


Starfire Nights

by Lomonaaeren



Series: Changing of the Guard [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU of Own Fic, Crossdressing, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Homophobia, M/M, Midsummer, Parties, Transfiguration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-01
Updated: 2013-03-31
Packaged: 2017-12-07 03:24:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/743631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is an AU of my fic Changing of the Guard. What would happen if Harry and Draco had met six years earlier than they did in that fic, in the middle of a series of fantastic Midsummer’s Eve parties? What would happen if Draco figured out Harry’s secret almost immediately, and did a little judicious blackmail—while Harry did a little judicious charming?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for duchessa, who won the auction for a fanfic I offered at help_haiti and made a generous donation to the cause of helping Haiti rebuild. She asked for an AU of my fic _Changing of the Guard_ where Harry and Draco meet under different circumstances and Draco figures out who Harry is. If you haven’t read CotG, you should before reading this fic, but these are the basics: Harry is gay (though no one except Ron and Hermione knows that) and pretends to be a weak and pathetic recluse. In reality, he is the owner and sole employee of Metamorphosis, a business that promises the “perfect stranger” for every situation, and an expert in Transfigurations, glamours, and other magic that makes him into hundreds of different people. No one knows this secret.

  
Arms lifted high above his head, a whisper of magic along the underside of them to turn all the dark hair a soft and sparkling blonde. A pause, a glance in the mirror, and he adjusted the color; it had turned _too_ bright, an unnatural gold that might attract attention. Perhaps it wouldn’t, but why should he take the chance? He hardly wanted anyone to learn the secret he was protecting, and, at the same time, flaunting by venturing out in public.  
  
 _Albeit so heavily disguised that no one can recognize me_ , he admitted as he turned the rest of his arm and leg hair golden. A Depilatory Charm on his legs followed. Then he cast the Lengthening Charm on his hair, wincing as the tight curls unwound into looser ones that tumbled to his shoulders.  
  
For a moment, Harry smiled into the mirror. His face already looked half-alien, framed as it was by the long, bright yellow hair. He shook his head, and the hair flew forwards and against his jaw.   
  
_Ah, yes. I knew I forgot something_. He tapped his wand against his jaw, muttering the Depilatory Charm again, and the hair there was tugged out in a series of small sparking pains.  
  
He laid down the wand for a moment and reached for the Muggle contacts that he preferred to use on his eyes when he didn’t have long to prepare the spells that would change the color. Those spells were risky anyway, especially for someone as near-sighted as Harry. The last thing he wanted was to end up with vision even more damaged than it already was.  
  
His eyes watered as he carefully guided the contacts in, and he had to start over again with the left eye, but at last it was done, and the stranger in the mirror had blue eyes. Not too vivid, of course. Harry had quickly found out that when he made his eyes as bright as they were naturally, even if they were a different color, they drew all sorts of unwanted attention. No one had ever recognized him as Harry Potter, but he didn’t need people tripping over themselves and asking him to dance, either. The goal was to be nodded to, but not noticed.  
  
Harry paused a minute to stand still and simply breathe. The exaltation of being able to pass unnoticed through wizarding society, secure behind a hundred different faces, while everyone else thought he was cooped up in Grimmauld Place, made him dizzy when he thought about it.  
  
Then he shook his head, opened his eyes, and returned to his preparations. Spells didn’t work as well on his curse scar as they should, but he _did_ shorten and thin it, and the makeup he planned to use to make his skin paler would take care of the rest. He softened the angles of his face, clucking under his breath at the pain as the bones slid and shifted. _You’d think I’d be used to this by now, as often as I’ve done it._  
  
His nose looked unbalanced with the new lines of his cheeks and jaw. Harry made it smaller and flatter, and then choked as the spell interfered with his breathing. It took a few hasty passes of the wand to correct _that._  
  
He’d had a lot of practice, yes, but four years wasn’t enough to guarantee perfection.  
  
After that was the makeup—careful touches to his forehead, eyelids, cheeks, and earlobes. The lipstick was meant to add a gentle red color to his lips, like the shade of the blue contacts in his eyes. Harry picked up the gold-and-jade earrings that lay on the dresser, simple knots that became more intricate the more one looked, and slid them through the holes in his ears that weren’t there all the time.  
  
Then he faced the mirror again and held up his arms, more careful than ever as he murmured the necessary spells. Changing his nose might interfere with his breathing; changing his chest could interfere with his internal organs.  
  
He had practiced since last time, however, and now his skin bulged and swelled without effort and almost without pain. It ended, and Harry was left staring at a pair of small breasts. He smiled. It would be enough, combined with everything else, to enable him to pass as a woman tonight; he wasn’t about to change himself below the waist unless it was an emergency, and perhaps not even then. He was better at graceful excuses to avoid sex than he was at altering his genitals.  
  
Harry shuddered a little from the memory of what had happened when he last tried that, then winked at his reflection and turned towards the bed, where his clothes for the evening were laid out.  
  
 _Perfect._  
  
It was Harry Potter who had made the preparations, but it was Miranda Goldreyer who Apparated to the Wades’ Midsummer Eve party that evening and gathered her skirts to mount the stairs.  
  
*  
  
Draco sighed. He forgot now why he had decided to attend the Wades’ party. Most of the pure-bloods who would be here weren’t friends of his, or even people who had attended Hogwarts. They had been privately educated, or gone to Beuaxbatons or Durmstrang. All he would have to do here would be to talk, dance, drink, eat, and perhaps conclude a few bargains or pick up a few interesting bits of gossip if he was lucky.  
  
Then Draco remembered what he would be doing if he was still at home, and shook his head, snorting quietly at himself. _Boring, perhaps, but less so than sitting around and listening to Father making plans for me that I can never participate in._  
  
Draco drifted among the Wades’ guests, picking up drinks and taking small sips of them whenever a waiter slid past with a tray, watching the swirling gowns and robes, and listening to conversations that often stopped when he approached. Once he stood behind a tall witch in red robes, Marianne Barrow, because he knew that she wanted to speak against him, and couldn’t with him there. Her face was as red as the robes by the time Draco winked at her and turned away.  
  
He was looking around for a suitable dance partner when the crowd slid apart, the way it sometimes would at the right moment, and he saw the most interesting person he’d seen all night.  
  
Draco frankly stared. He didn’t mind admitting it, because this witch deserved to be stared at. She was taller than Draco was used to seeing a woman, with long, loose golden hair and a gown of brilliant green silk trimmed with gold. Her earrings were the same color, and she moved with a precise grace that made Draco suspect she’d taken real dancing lessons, not shuffled around on a floor in her parents’ house for a few hours once a week when she was sixteen, the way most of the people surrounding him had. Her arms were slim; her face was the home of faint and secret smiles.  
  
Draco saw that she leaned on the arm of a small, shrunken wizard named Ernest Yellson, whom she could have supported more easily, but he dismissed that. This was a woman who made her own decisions. If Draco succeeded in courting her away from Yellson, even if it was only to dance, it was the coward’s own fault for not being able to keep her.  
  
He stepped towards her. Her blue eyes fell on him, and widened. Draco had no doubt that she recognized him by hair and profile, if not by sight, but he didn’t know what to make of the thoughtful expression that settled over her face a moment later.   
  
_If I’d been able to make anything of her right away, she would be boring_ , Draco thought, and moved forwards again, making no secret that he was coming for her. The woman nodded back, but made no attempt to move, and alerted Yellson only with a touch on his arm.  
  
Draco was bowing to her soon. She didn’t appear to think that a curtsey was required. She nudged Yellson with her elbow.  
  
“Oh, um, yes,” Yellson muttered, flushing. _He knows that he’s bloody lucky to have her for a date_ , Draco thought, but didn’t glory in Yellson’s discomfort, because that would have meant looking away from the woman. “This is Miranda Goldreyer.”  
  
“I haven’t heard that family name before,” Draco murmured, and extended his hand for Miranda’s. She gave it to him. The tingling prickle of her long nails and the warm skin of her palm excited him in a way that nothing had in a long time. And the way she tilted her head and let her lashes fall over her eyes…surely he had once known someone who did that?   
  
_I would have remembered if I’d met her before, of course._  
  
“You wouldn’t have,” Miranda said. “I changed it when my family displeased me. I am the first of the Goldreyers, and I mean to be the last if I can’t breed a line that’s worthy to succeed me.”  
  
“Your family before that?” Draco asked, and felt his interest sharpen so fast it was like swallowing a shard of jagged mirror glass. _This_ was the kind of woman he might take as a bride, when he mustered a proper interest in marriage, and the kind that his father would never agree to him wedding.  
  
“I do not see that such information needs to be given up on the first meeting,” Miranda said, her voice ineffably calm. She looked carefully at his forehead and the sweep of his hair back from it, as if they would tell her more than the rest of his face. “Particularly when you cannot gratify me by giving me the name of your family as a surprise in return.”  
  
Draco smiled helplessly. _This is it. This is what I came here hoping to find, and hardly dared hope I would. Someone interesting._  
  
“I can hope to give you something else, since my name would not please you,” he said. “A dance?”  
  
“Of course not,” Miranda said, eyes widening as if she had seen something shocking. She didn’t withdraw her hand from his, despite that, Draco saw. “I’m here as Ernest’s date. I couldn’t simply forsake him.”  
  
“I’m sure that he wouldn’t mind,” Draco said, with a smile at Yellson that wasn’t nearly as important as the way his hand brushed the side of his robe above his wand.   
  
“I don’t dance with people who threaten others,” Miranda said. Impossibly, she seemed to have seen the motion of his hand. Draco had made the motion on the opposite side of his body from her, and she had spent the entire time looking steadily into his eyes. Draco stared hard at her, and received back only the cool look that she seemed to have designed to accompany her words.  
  
Yellson snickered a bit and then clung more firmly to her arm, nodding like a puppet. “That’s right, Malfoy. Do go away now. You’re polluting the air.”  
  
Draco felt his nostrils flare, and he took a deliberate step backwards, dropping Miranda’s hand as he went. “Perhaps you’re afraid to mention the family you came from because you’re afraid of how undistinguished they are,” he said.  
  
“Do think that if it makes you feel better,” Miranda said, her voice as gentle and cool as Draco had tried to make his. “I understand that your family has enough distinguishing _marks_ for anyone.” Her eyes flickered to Draco’s left arm. His only comfort was that she made the motion too quickly for anyone else to notice her looking, even if they were listening to the conversation. Miranda turned to Yellson and said, “Shall we dance?”  
  
Yellson led her onto the dance floor, pausing to peer spitefully over his shoulder at Draco. But Draco hardly cared about that. He stared after Miranda with his heart hammering so hard that he expected it to shake him from his feet.  
  
 _How dare she? It’s one thing to get mockery from Yellson, who will always be a dog cringing at my feet, but from her, when I honored her with my attention and wasn’t even put off by hearing that she came from no family worth mentioning?  
  
I will do something to pay her back for what she did. There must be something I can learn about her past, something that will make her ask me for mercy._  
  
Draco watched as Miranda and Yellson whirled around the dance floor. It annoyed him all the more that there was no visible flaw in her dancing. Her shoes were simple, gold-colored sandals which matched the simplicity of her gown, and there were tiny gems sparking and winking in them like full moons. Perhaps those gems were merely paste instead of the diamonds they looked like, but most people in the room would hardly care about that.  
  
He had to find something else.  
  
He looked at the way Miranda’s head loomed over Yellson, and briefly considered trying to humiliate her for her height, something that she must have experienced in the past. But, once again, it didn’t have enough of a _personal_ sting. It would have to be her family, he thought. It was the weapon she had willingly handed him, never dreaming that it had an edge. That would make it all the more fitting for him to damage her with it.  
  
Goldreyer wasn’t common. There had to be someone who had heard of her. And Draco had made his living since the war carefully setting up a network of contacts that would gradually allow him to establish his own business, independent of his father. There were people at the party who owed him favors.  
  
Draco turned and cut into the crowd like a shark through the waters, mildly amused when he remembered his own earlier thoughts.   
  
_No, I cannot say that this party is boring._  
  
*  
  
“Do you think he suspects?” Ernest asked Miranda in a soft voice.  
  
Miranda shook her head, watching over Ernest’s shoulder as Malfoy vanished across the room. He was probably drinking some wine to ease his stinging heart, she thought sardonically. It was the sort of thing that he would try when his attempts to humiliate someone else didn’t work.  
  
“I’m sure that no one suspects I’m here as your bodyguard and not your date,” she murmured. “You play your part well.”  
  
Ernest nodded, but his face was tight with anxiety anyway. “Don’t say those words aloud, please.”  
  
Now that they were dancing, and involved in an activity that he’d endured months of training for and could practically do in his sleep, Harry allowed his mask to relax a bit. Vanishing completely into Miranda’s personality tired him in a way that rarely happened with most of his personas. She was unlike him in ways that were far from obvious. Her disdain, her pride, her unobtrusive way of being the center of attention…Harry was already glad that most of the personalities people rented from Metamorphosis could vanish without trace later, because trying to be Miranda for days would have exhausted him.  
  
Ernest sighed and whirled Harry around the floor with ease. At least he was a graceful dancer, Harry thought. He was also a paranoid whiner who had contacted the Manager of Metamorphosis—whom he didn’t know was Harry—and demanded a beautiful, female bodyguard who could pose as a perfectly ordinary date. He was convinced that someone was tracking him, trying to kill him, because he had refused to sell his prize-winning Abraxan mare. Harry privately thought Ernest’s fears ridiculous, but he was paid to be other people on these missions, not express his opinion of his clients.   
  
_And no one knows._  
  
Harry smiled. That was the best part of the whole thing. The world thought they knew Harry Potter, and thus thought he’d spent the last five years immured in Grimmauld Place after a distinctly unsatisfactory attempt to make himself part of ordinary life in the wizarding world, forever counting his past glories while his magic faded. None of them knew that Harry originated the rumors as an extra layer of protection. Even if someone did start to suspect the secret behind Metamorphosis, that one person was everyone involved with it, they would laugh to scorn the idea that Harry Potter could be that person.  
  
 _No one knows me._  
  
It was safety, it was a job, and it was a way for him to help people without being an Auror, which had been a disastrous experiment. And it was glory and art and freedom to him.  
  
Ernest tapped his shoulder, and Harry woke Miranda again and dove back into the sea of her soul. She turned around and followed Ernest’s gaze to a far corner of the room.   
  
“Do you see someone there that you recognize?” she asked, making sure that her voice stayed calm and that her movements never slowed as she and Ernest whirled through the last steps of the dance.   
  
“There’s a man staring at me,” Ernest hissed. “He’s been staring at me for the last few minutes, and I don’t like it.”  
  
“It might be harmless, but I’ll be on my guard,” Miranda said, and took his hand and led him away from the dance floor as the music ended. Ernest made sure to hide behind her as they fetched food from the overloaded table in the front of this room. The Wades, like many of the other pure-blood families who celebrated the days leading up to Midsummer’s Eve, had so much food that the sight of it made Miranda slightly sick. She had grown up poor. There was no reason to have five kinds of cheese, six kinds of wine, and ten kinds of bread available on the mere chance that someone might be bored with one kind. And since they had chosen bread, cheese, and wine in the first place because they wrongly imagined it was the kind of meal “simple” people ate, she could barely persuade herself to swallow it.  
  
But eating in front of Ernest would persuade him to eat, as well, and probably calm him down. Miranda turned and faced the crowd, keeping an eye out for the man Ernest said had been watching him, and saw a fairly nondescript wizard moving slowly towards them.  
  
Miranda narrowed her eyes and palmed her wand. Perhaps Ernest had been more right than he knew. There was a slightly crazed look in the man’s eyes that she knew well. Her cousin Donald had looked like that right before he attacked her and she had to kill him.  
  
“Stay where you are,” she murmured to Ernest, and he froze. At least he wasn’t the kind of person who let his fear drive him into running around the room like a madman, Miranda thought, as she turned and faced the wizard walking towards them.  
  
The man had a somewhat pleasant smile, but he didn’t stop moving, even when she shook her head warningly at him. He lifted his wand and cut apart the banner over her head. He probably imagined that it would fall on her and tangle her while he ran around her and did whatever it was that he wanted to do to Ernest.  
  
Miranda hadn’t become a bodyguard by falling for simple tricks like that. She stepped neatly to the side, sheltering Ernest and getting ready to resist the other spells that the assailant might try at the same time, and murmured one of her special spells to the tiles under his feet. The tiles sparkled brilliant green and white, like camellia flowers among their leaves, and she was sorry to destroy them. But protecting Ernest’s life was more important.  
  
(That was another reason, other than Donald’s attack, that she had left her family. They didn’t always agree with her on lives being more important than the decorations that they placed around their house for parties).  
  
The tile sagged under the wizard’s feet, making him stumble, and then surged up and around him. It had become a giant leafy sheath of the kind that Venus’-flytraps used to ensnare their prey. The “teeth” at the edges of the leaves interlocked and closed gently but inexorably, and the wizard might as well drop his wand now for all the good it would do him. The inside of the leaves was impermeable to magic of any sort, though they could be easily affected from the outside.  
  
Miranda stepped back and bowed slightly to her hostess, Mrs. Wade, who was hurrying up with a pale face and golden robes that rustled and clanged around her as if they were actually made of the metal. “Forgive me for destroying your beautiful floor,” Miranda said, as politely as she knew how. “I would never have done it if this man hadn’t tried to attack me and my date.” She would preserve the fiction that Ernest was her date instead of her client for as long as she could.  
  
“I don’t understand it,” Mrs. Wade said, and she glanced at Miranda for permission before she peeled back the outer sheath of the leaf. The man inside glared at her through the strings of juice that covered him, and she shook her head. “His name is Thomas Young, and he’s never been anything but polite and courteous in his attendance at our parties. Are you sure—”  
  
“Yes,” Ernest said, coming forwards. Now that the immediate danger was over, he seemed more collected. “A man who tried to buy a horse from me I don’t intend to sell was named Nelson Young. And after that, I received several threatening letters in a handwriting that was unfamiliar to me, but which included references to my transactions with Young that _I_ certainly never released.” He turned to the captive Thomas. “I think that I would be very interested in knowing more about his family.”  
  
“He _does_ have a brother called Nelson,” said Mrs. Wade, in a subdued voice. She bowed to Ernest. “I think we should be grateful that Miss, er, your date was here to catch him,” she said, with a timid little glance at Miranda.  
  
Miranda smiled. “Goldreyer, ma’am. You wouldn’t have heard of me,” she added, when Mrs. Wade’s eyes glazed slightly. She knew the expression of a pure-blood witch or wizard trying to fit someone into the mental family trees they all had written on the insides of their eyelids.  
  
Mrs. Wade sighed, as though she was glad to have one less thing to deal with, and then began apologizing to Ernest and approving Young’s removal from the house. Miranda shook her head and stood in the background, where she could be present if Ernest needed her but wouldn’t be in the way. She was pleased with the way things had worked out. She was a bodyguard, yes, but no one had guessed that. She hadn’t had to inflict violence on anyone, not really, or destroy the house.  
  
She noticed a few people watching her out of the corner of their eyes, but most of them were more interested in the spectacle of Mrs. Wade scolding Young for ruining her party, and his sullen answers. This one wasn’t a clever assassin, at least, Miranda was glad to note. He didn’t even have a lie thought up for why he’d been doing what he’d been doing if he was caught.  
  
One pair of eyes didn’t move from her back. She tracked them down slowly, looking people in the face for moments at a time, as if she wasn’t especially interested in any of them. But she finally made out who was staring at her as if she, and not Mrs. Wade, was the star of the evening.  
  
Draco Malfoy.  
  
 _He forms grudges in an instant, and holds them for a lifetime_ , Harry thought. _Well, it doesn’t matter. Unless Ernest really thinks that he’s still under threat, then Miranda Goldreyer disappears after tonight_. He never used most of his personas more than once. They were meant to make certain tasks easier, to be perfect strangers, as the motto of Metamorphosis claimed, because he had spent months but not years building most of them up. There were only so many wizards and witches with extraordinary skill or beauty or whatever it was that his clients demanded who could exist before other people started getting suspicious.  
  
He would be sorrier to retire Miranda than most of them, he had to admit. She had spirit.  
  
And he had been able to vanish inside her, once he worked out how to do it. It wasn’t as tiring as he had feared. His experience had triumphed again, rather than the experience itself.   
  
Harry smiled. One of the things he enjoyed most about running Metamorphosis was that it made him feel _competent_ —competent at something besides killing Dark Lords, which, let’s face the fact, were not exactly common.  
  
Competent, and like he had a place in the world.  
  
For that, he would put up with the occasional inconvenience, such as the conversations with gits like Malfoy, that sometimes happened.  
  
*  
  
 _I’ve seen that before. I know I have. But…how?_  
  
Draco had a good memory, he knew that. He had managed to memorize most of his notes before he took the NEWTs, and that was as good as walking into the room with the book in his head. He had a good memory for faces, and a better one since he had started trying to break free of the dominion of his parents. He wanted to remember the people who would help him, and the ones he should never approach under any circumstances.  
  
But he hadn’t realized his memory was _this_ good. That he could take a motion he had seen years ago and decide that he was seeing the same person again from that movement and no more, although the face and the body were different.  
  
 _She fights the way Potter fights. That motion she made when she lunged forwards on one foot and held out her wand…that’s one he used when he was casting._  
  
By now, of course, doubt was creeping in to disturb the original intuition that he’d been so sure of. How did he know that this woman was Potter? The last he had heard, there was a rumor that Potter was cooped up in his house and never came out and never saw anyone but his two best friends. Or something like that. Draco had ceased to pay attention to Potter once it became clear that Potter wasn’t going to take part in the wizarding world that Draco lived in and wanted to be free in.  
  
Then he remembered that he had seen that motion last in a highly charged moment. Potter had been facing the Dark Lord, and talking about the reason he was so sure he was master of the Elder Wand and would win, and Draco had been standing there beside his parents, his heart hurting, his head throbbing, silently willing Potter to stop _talking_ and get on with it.  
  
Yes. He had made that motion when he cast _Expelliarmus_. Draco was certain. He couldn’t forget, not when that memory was limned in his mind in such distinct colors. He was never going to forget anything about that moment, that day.  
  
And it wasn’t as though he risked anything if he was wrong. He planned to tell no one about his conclusion. He would simply confront this Miranda, and that would be enough. If he was wrong, then he would _Obliviate_ her so that she could tell no one else of his shame.   
  
And if he was right—  
  
Draco shook his head. Beside the hungry impatience to prove the woman who had humiliated him wrong had sprung up a curiosity that burned as bright as a white flame and devoured like it, too. Only this time it was burning on Draco’s questions, and it wanted to burn on answers instead.  
  
If he was right, and it was Potter, then he would learn _why_.  
  
*  
  
Ernest seemed much calmer, and practically drunk on power now that he had confronted the only man he probably had much to fear from. He thanked Harry graciously, but denied needing another bodyguard. So Harry turned away and walked through the crowd, declining several invitations to dance with smiles and shakes of his head. He walked in Miranda’s skin and drew breaths with her lungs for the last time.  
  
It was somewhat sad, for he had put time and effort into his creation of Miranda. But he had hundreds of other personalities which were waiting for their chance to be used. And someone might recognize her if she appeared again, and there was the slight chance that she might be connected with Harry Potter. Harry could never endure that. So back into the great sea of his imagination she went, and maybe her hair or her eyes or part of her history would appear again in another person.  
  
“Potter.”  
  
Harry almost stumbled. To hear someone speak that name to one of his personas was his greatest nightmare. And this had been in Malfoy’s voice. His nightmare couldn’t have picked a better way to incarnate itself.  
  
But if he stumbled, that would prove Malfoy right. Harry kept walking, instead. After all, Miranda’s last name wasn’t Potter, and even her original last name had been different. She wasn’t a fan of Harry Potter, either. She would have no reason to look around, or stumble, or react to the name in any way.  
  
Malfoy’s hand clamped down on his arm. Harry continued walking as if he hadn’t noticed it, then reached the limit of Malfoy’s hold and turned back with a small, annoyed sigh. “Yes?” he asked in Miranda’s voice, looking into Malfoy’s eyes. “Was there something you wanted? I’m afraid that I’m tired and won’t accept another invitation to dance. An assassination attempt _does_ so ruin my enjoyment of a party.”  
  
Malfoy loomed close to him. They were in an anteroom, near the front doors but distant from the rest of the party; Mrs. Wade liked her guests to arrive on time, and no one was lingering here now. “I know it’s you,” he breathed. “It was _always_ you, wasn’t it? You didn’t change places with this woman. You didn’t Polyjuice into her. She’s completely a pretense, and you changed yourself into her. Really, Potter, well-played. I wouldn’t have thought you were that much of an actor.”  
  
 _And I might believe in the admiration in your voice, except that your gloating ruins it,_ Harry thought. He widened his eyes and shook his head. “Do you see Harry Potter everywhere you look?” he asked. “That’s an interesting delusion. I did hear that you had a rivalry with him during school—as much of a rivalry as it can be when one person wins all the time, at least.”  
  
Malfoy’s lips briefly showed his teeth, but he pressed closer instead of exploding in rage the way Harry’s words had been designed to make him do. “It won’t do, Potter,” he said, as if he thought that speaking calmly was the key to making Harry reveal himself. “I recognized you when you fought. There’s no one in the world but you who handles his wand like that, and I know who you are under all that.” His eyes flickered over Miranda’s face and hair, trying to dissipate the charms. “I’ve already cast a spell that would have removed the glamours, so it must be Transfiguration and advanced spells. Impressive. Nearly as impressive as your acting ability. But I know who you are.”  
  
Harry looked over Malfoy’s shoulder, as if for help. Of course, everyone else was distant from them or Malfoy wouldn’t have dared confront him in the first place, but someone could have come in during the meantime, which seemed to be what Malfoy feared. He turned his head, just slightly.  
  
Harry held up his wand and murmured the Memory Charm that would take care of this little problem. He didn’t put much power behind the spell. It couldn’t be a particularly long-lasting memory, since this was the first time Miranda had ever appeared in public and Harry had just defeated Young a few minutes ago.  
  
But the spell bounced off Malfoy’s temple with a silvery flash. Harry swore inwardly. _I should have considered the fact that Malfoy would probably have a Memory Shield_. The charms, cast on pure-bloods by a Mind-Healer from St. Mungo’s, deflected Memory Charms and other simple spells that would interfere with the mind.  
  
Malfoy turned back as if he had all the time in the world, which he did, now. Harry’s failed spell had told him there was something to hide there.  
  
“It _is_ you,” he said again, but this time he was more assured. “Why are you dressed up and acting like a woman, Potter?”  
  
Harry made some quick calculations. He wanted to storm haughtily away and say it was nothing of Malfoy’s business, but that was Miranda speaking. Besides, Malfoy would be able to get part of the truth from Ernest with a little pumping, if not Miranda’s identity.  
  
 _Partial truth is the best way to do things_. Since he made a living by lies, Harry was able to gauge to a nicety how much of a dangerous drink like truth was needed in any one moment.  
  
“I work for Metamorphosis,” he said, heaving a sigh and looking down at the ground as he rubbed his temple. It helped that he didn’t wear his own face, and Malfoy’s attempts to understand his expressions would be thrown off by that, but avoiding his eyes was even more of a protection, in its own way. “You’ve probably heard of it. Of course, no one would hire the notorious Harry Potter under his real name and face.” He shrugged. “And trying to be an Auror didn’t work out. So I have a few disguises that I rotate, changing them each time so no one recognizes me. Ernest was nervous about people trying to kill him, and wanted a bodyguard.”  
  
Malfoy was silent for so long that Harry looked back up. “You realize that someone will be along in a moment, and probably wonder why you’re holding an attractive witch against the wall?” he asked, sliding a sly tease into his tone. “Or possibly a man?”  
  
 _That ought to sting_. Most of the wizards Harry knew hated the mere imputation of homosexuality. Sex was for marriage, and marriage was for children, and children strengthened the family and continued the traditions the wizarding world was so obsessed by. Malfoy would back away in a hurry when he realized how close he stood to Harry, how he was practically breathing into his face.  
  
*  
  
 _He works for Metamorphosis. That makes sense._  
  
Draco had heard of the business. It ensured that those who needed perfect strangers could find them. Draco had never heard of anyone who used it being betrayed or, most of the time, less than satisfied with who they had hired. And then those people kindly vanished and were never heard of again. _That_ was the part Draco had found suspicious.  
  
Now it appeared the mystery was solved. The people Metamorphosis hired out were actors like Potter, hiding their true appearances and perhaps their skills behind glamours and Transfigurations.  
  
 _But why would Potter have taken up such a career in the first place? It’s not as though he lacked recognition. And he wasn’t ever any good at acting while we were at school._  
  
Draco was so involved in his thoughts that Potter’s words took a few minutes to catch up with him. Then he let his mouth curl in contempt and leaned in further still.  
  
“Perhaps _you’re_ the one who’s afraid of being pinned by an attractive man,” he whispered. “I’ll look perfectly normal to anyone watching, but we both know the truth. I notice that you haven’t made a motion to free yourself from me yet, Potter.”  
  
Potter stared at him. It was hard to tell the truth between those blue eyes and that unmarked forehead and those decorated cheeks that wouldn’t reveal the telltale blush, but Draco thought he read surprise there instead of shock or disgust.  
  
 _That is interesting_ , Draco thought, with a slow stirring in the back of his mind like a snake sliding about in the darkness. _I will keep it in mind._  
  
Then Potter snorted and pushed on his shoulders. “I was trying not to cause a scandal that would horrify Mrs. Wade,” he said. “I think I’ve already done enough of that.”  
  
Draco caught one neatly manicured hand and held it still. “You clean up very well,” he said, keeping his voice lowered. “There are lots of people who would be interested to know that. Who do you think I should tell?”  
  
Potter gave him a hard look that burned through the makeup and other pieces of the disguise he wore to convey his contempt clearly. Draco drew back his shoulders instinctively. He had once wanted to impress Potter. He had lost that desire—he thought—but he had a new one: to make Potter stop looking at him like that.  
  
“Oh, it’s to be blackmail, is it?” Potter shook his head. “Well, my manager won’t bother listening to you. After all, after tonight Miranda Goldreyer will vanish, and neither you nor anyone else will recognize me when I venture out in a different disguise.”  
  
Draco’s hands tightened on Potter. Somehow—he didn’t understand how, when he was the one who had figured out the truth and the one holding Potter prisoner—he was losing again. Potter seemed to be slipping away from him into a dark, complex world, leaving both Draco’s goals and his methods behind as too small to bother with. Potter was _winning_ , though Draco didn’t understand how he was doing it.  
  
He couldn’t let that happen. There had to be something that could stop this flight and win him the battle, if not the war.  
  
“What would you say to a spot of private blackmail, Potter?” he whispered, letting his breath barely stir the golden hair. Was it a wig? Draco doubted it was a glamour, or he would have seen it shimmer by now. Perhaps Potter had changed his entire head. He would have had to, Draco decided. That messy black hair was too identifiable if he had let a spell fade. “You do something for me, and I don’t make you known to everyone at the party, or to anyone else. And I forget all about your working for Metamorphosis, too.”  
  
“You intrigue me,” Potter said, and his voice was calmer and heavier, more passionate and more present. Draco relaxed.  
  
 _He’s coming back_ , he thought, and then forbade himself to think of why that was so important to him.  
  
*  
  
Harry had never played so hard as he did now.  
  
He had had to construct, on the fly and while still giving reasonable replies to Malfoy’s questions and demands, a persona capable of dealing with the idea that his world was dissolving around him. To be recognized as a Metamorphosis worker was the beginning of the end. Someone might follow that back and find out that he ran everything, that he _was_ everyone. And someone else would say that was unhealthy, and they would try to let the Mind-Healers at him, and everything Harry had built and worked for and enjoyed and loved would fall into a pile of ashes and dust.  
  
The persona had to deal with his own panic, too, and seal it away in a small area where it couldn’t affect the rest of him. The persona did that, and was calm and cool and heroic, and, for once, had no history. Harry enjoyed creating the kinds of backgrounds and families that his personas would require, but this one was born and would die in an anteroom of the Wades’ home.  
  
It worked. The persona took over and gave Harry’s answers for him, and even sounded no more than mildly interested or scornful when Malfoy threatened him. He was hard enough to face a room full of laughter, because he cared about other things.   
  
Harry was dazzled with his own skill, and answered the question about private blackmail because Malfoy would expect it of him. In reality, he was flying through the starry darkness around his own center, and exulting.  
  
 _I can do this. Even under great pressure. I can do this.  
  
I’ll always be free, and no one will catch me._  
  
The thought made him quiet and happy on the deepest level, the level that no one else would ever see. He lifted his eyes to Malfoy’s, and he was almost _really_ the person he had pretended to be, capable of escaping the panic that Malfoy tried to inspire with his words.  
  
“What did you have in mind?” he asked, and he was casual and careful and cautious and _free._  
  
“I’m trying to establish a business,” Malfoy said, “independently of my father’s control. He would prefer that I stay dependent on him, of course, and most of the pure-bloods I know still think of me as his son before they think of me as anything else. I want you to help me promote it. Creating a spectacle for me at the Midsummer’s Eve parties would help.”  
  
Harry cocked his head and relaxed further. That made more sense than he had thought it would, given Malfoy’s genius for stupid plans. But he couldn’t let on that it was better than most of the bargains he’d thought Malfoy would make, because he couldn’t seem _too_ versatile. “Most of my skills are in bodyguarding and going on dates with people who just want someone pretty,” he said. “What makes you think I could help?”  
  
“Because you have skill in glamours and Transfigurations,” Malfoy murmured. He was leaning towards Harry again, his breath coming faster, and Harry wondered in faint interest if he really _was_ bent. “I meant what I said. What I want is a spectacle. Get people’s attention. Appear utterly taken with this concept yourself, and I’m sure that other people will give in and buy it.”  
  
Harry thought that over. Yes, he could do it; he was certain of that. The problem was whether he wanted to.   
  
_Not to mention the person he wants me to go as_. “I can’t promote it as Harry Potter,” he said. “For one thing, no one would believe it.”  
  
Malfoy snorted and finally leaned back and took his hands away from Harry’s shoulders, which made him feel slightly better. Malfoy shouldn’t clutch either Harry or the new persona he was using right now by the shoulders. “I don’t think they would,” he said. “No. Come in as an actor from Metamorphosis, wrapped up in glamours and whatever else you think you need.”  
  
“It’s more complicated than that,” Harry started to protest, and then slammed his mouth shut. He’d become overconfident. He was banishing the new persona now and complaining the way he would have if Malfoy had spoken to _him_ like that. He had to remember that any words Harry Potter spoke could get someone interested, and Malfoy might start thinking about it in more depth and decide that there was more to Metamorphosis than what he was saying.  
  
Luckily, Malfoy had taken this particular slip in the best possible way he could have taken it. “I’m sure it is,” he said, with a tiny, dismissive flip of his hand. “But it doesn’t matter. I want someone who can cause others to pay attention. Someone who can make them _stare_.”  
  
Harry felt the shine and the dip in the back of his mind that said a new persona was forming. He took a deep, contented breath. “I can do that,” he said, and a name came trembling into his head like a flame. _Lionel Truth. That’s who he’ll be._  
  
“You haven’t even asked me what the business is yet,” Malfoy said. His face had become its old suspicious mask, and he craned his head to the side as if he imagined that he would be able to see what went on behind Harry’s mask that way. “And you needn’t think that I’ll pay you the outrageous rates I’m sure you get when you work for Metamorphosis. Your payment is that I’m keeping your nasty little secret.”  
  
Harry’s lungs felt bigger, and the new persona was coming clearer and clearer in his head, with brown hair and green eyes—the eyes could be left almost the same, except the need for some magic that would take the clarity of their color away—and a daredevil grin. He would laugh when people asked him what kind of name Truth was, and then offer his hand to shake, staring straight into their eyes all the while. They would wonder if they could trust him, but he would wink, and then they wouldn’t care.  
  
It was an effort to force his mind away from the fires of creation to the mundane business of answering Malfoy’s question. “Yes, I know,” he said, and he sounded weary and impatient and was proud of himself. He was keeping secrets even from someone who had excellent reason to be suspicious of him. “What is your business?”  
  
Malfoy struck a pose that he probably didn’t know he was making. Harry might have thought of hiring him for Metamorphosis if the business had needed actual employees. “Malfoy’s Machineries,” he said.  
  
Harry arched his eyebrows, unable to do anything else. The thought of Malfoys and the thought of the Muggle technology he could instantly see in his head when Malfoy pronounced the name struck sparks off each other. “And what do you make?”  
  
“Machines endowed with spells to replace house-elves,” Malfoy said, sounding more and more satisfied with himself as he spoke. “Pans that clean themselves. Stoves that cook the food to the perfect temperature without a constant adjustment of charms. Cloaks that shake all the dust off when you take them off and hang them on the peg.”  
  
Harry considered him carefully. That was a cleverer idea than he would have thought Malfoy could come up with. “Why do you need my help to promote this?” he asked. “It sounds as though you could do well enough on your own.”  
  
Malfoy sneered, and his voice lowered. Harry watched his face and saw the lines forming there, carving themselves with the ease of furrows that had appeared more than once. “I told you. Most of the pure-bloods think that I’m an appendage to my father. They’re used to him coming out of retirement and gaining power again. They won’t dare support something he disapproves of, just in case he roars back to strength later and remembers that. And he _does_ disapprove of it. He doesn’t want me selling anything, let alone machines that he believes won’t succeed and that are meant to replace house-elves.”  
  
Harry nodded. “And you need the pure-bloods to buy the machines first, so that the less wealthy wizards will see and imitate them.”  
  
Malfoy shut his mouth hard on whatever he had been going to say. Then he murmured, “You’re more clear-sighted than I thought you were.”  
  
Harry bit his lip to keep from laughing, because Malfoy didn’t know who that clear sight belonged to. “I have a persona in mind to adopt. What’s the next Midsummer’s Eve party you’re going to?” There was a series of such parties all through the month of June, but Harry didn’t think Malfoy would consider all of them equally good candidates for launching his publicity campaign.  
  
“The party at Unruffled,” Malfoy said, and must have seen something in his face Harry hadn’t fully intended to put there, because he nodded. “Yes, the name strikes me, and most of the other people who know it, as absurd. But they have good food. And there will be plenty of people anxious to show off their new robes and wealth there.”  
  
Harry stopped a cynical comment about wealth from escaping, because it wasn’t the sort of thing either his new persona or Lionel Truth would say. “All right. That’s in three days, isn’t it?” Malfoy nodded. “When do you intend to show up?”  
  
“At eight in the evening,” Malfoy said, with the calm assurance of someone who believed in marble floors, fine robes, and the ability of any wizard who really _tried_ to wrestle down something so simple and well-meaning as time. “You will be there.”  
  
It was a command, not a question, but Harry nodded. Lionel Truth wouldn’t mind Malfoy ordering him about; he would laugh it off. “Farewell, then.” He started to turn away, pieces of history traveling through his head like sleet. Lionel had a younger sister who lived in Spain and whom he hadn’t seen since they had a raging fight over what, exactly, she was going to do with her life. She had gone off and married someone in revenge, and then had the temerity to be disgustingly happy. Lionel would roll his eyes when he said that, and no one who listened would know whether he was joking or not.  
  
“Potter!”  
  
Harry winced; that name grated on him when he was deep in the toils of creating a new persona, or, for that matter, when he was wearing another face and another name. He turned around, though, and saw Malfoy bracing one hand on his hip. Harry started, but managed to cover his laughter in time.  
  
 _That doesn’t make him look at all attractive. I wonder if he knows that._  
  
“What will you look like?” Malfoy challenged him. “This?”  
  
“That would be a little strange, wouldn’t it?” Harry asked. “After all, how many people saw Miranda humiliate you?” Miranda’s persona squirmed in the back of his head, uncomfortable with being spoken of that way, but Lionel’s overpowered her. “No. I’ll be male, and you’ll know me when you see me.”  
  
He left, then, and ignored the one low call of his name Malfoy sent after him. He had a spectacle to plan.  
  
As he went, he dissipated the privacy spell he’d cast, wandlessly, the moment Malfoy had seized him. It was his first and instinctive defense when someone looked like they were near to figuring out his secret.   
  
_It doesn’t matter if he destroys a temporary persona, but no one is going to link my name with Metamorphosis._


	2. Chapter 2

  
_I may have a chance at being free._  
  
That was the first thought Draco had when he awoke the next morning. He lay still for some time, looking up at the ceiling of his room. It was made of marble, like most of the other ceilings in the Manor, his parents being such traditionalists in some matters that Draco wouldn’t dream of asking them to change. But there was wood around the edges of the ceiling, and Draco had left his personality behind there as best he could, by casting spells that worked the wood into bright abstract patterns.  
  
He stood up then and shook his head. It was ridiculous to let so much hope ride on Potter. After all, the man was only doing as Draco had asked because Draco was blackmailing him.  
  
But it was more than he had had the day before, and Draco kept that in mind as he went to shower and then downstairs to eat breakfast with his parents in the cavernous chamber that was the central dining room.  
  
His mother already sat at the table, her eyes bent on a blue flower in front of her that had certainly come from the gardens. Draco didn’t know what kind it was, and he didn’t know if he wanted to know why his mother was staring at it so intently, tilting her head to the side sometimes as if listening for a voice to speak to her in return. He kissed her and sank down into the chair across the table from her, looking at Lucius’s empty seat. “Has Father been delayed?”  
  
“He went to inspect the gardens,” his mother replied, not lifting her gaze. “There was heavy wind last night. You know that he likes to make sure that not too many bushes were denuded of their leaves and blossoms by weather conditions like those.”  
  
Draco kept his silence and his opinions to himself, but he knew the real reason his father had gone outside. It was to walk and meditate, to think of ways for restoring the Malfoy name or ways of keeping control of Draco or ways of looking better to the pure-blood social circles that still surrounded him and considered him part of the center of their world. The house-elves were perfectly capable of taking care of the gardens, and would already have cleaned up any damage.   
  
But his father was incapable of doing anything simple. He always had to dress up the relatively normal things he did in talk of the majestic. Draco considered it his major fault.  
  
They waited until the glass doors at the far side of the room opened and Lucius strode in, the expression on his face implacable. _If he was walking among flowers_ , Draco thought, arrested as usual by the contrast between the way his father looked and the amount of power he actually wielded, _he’d be trampling on them._  
  
“Good morning,” Lucius said emptily into the middle of the air, to no one in particular, and then took his usual place a chair down from Narcissa. Food appeared at once, along with the plates. Lucius picked up his fork and began eating without glancing left or right.  
  
Draco felt a muscle tighten in his cheek as he applied himself to his own toast and eggs. Ordinary food, but his father ate it as if it were a matter of life and death how many times he chewed.  
  
Then he sighed. This was only one of a number of poses that his father ran through, as regular as water tumbling downhill. If anything, Draco ought to be used to it by now and to have forgiven Lucius all the little sins that he went through in pursuit of power. He was quite ready to do the same thing to make large amounts of money and to have his freedom.  
  
 _The difference between me and my father is that I don’t expect anyone else to believe it with me_ , Draco thought, tracking his tongue around the outside of his lip to capture a bit of toast that had escaped. _I’ll do things on my own and then ask people to evaluate my efforts. Father expects respect before he’s done anything._  
  
“Don’t lick your lips like that, Draco,” Lucius said, without looking away from whatever middle distance fascinated him as he ate his breakfast. “It’s undignified for a Malfoy.” And he bit into his eggs precisely, to show how it should be done.  
  
“Yes, Father,” Draco said meekly.  
  
His mother glanced at him. She didn’t do it sharply, but that she did it at all, instead of spending the breakfast communing with her flower, was unusual. Draco knew she would want to speak with him when the meal was done.  
  
Lucius placed the plate back on the table when he was finished, announced, “I am walking in the front gardens now,” and strode out of the dining rooms by the front doors. His plate vanished as the elves moved in.  
  
“You ought to be more patient with him,” Narcissa said, when the doors had closed and there was less chance of Lucius hearing them. Unless he had left eavesdropping spells in the room, of course, which he had done before, but Draco had already cast a spell that cleared the room of those when he came in. He had developed his own repertoire of tricks and habitual poses. It was only ever his mother who noticed they were poses, though.  
  
“Why?” Draco demanded. “Moping around like this won’t give him the respect he craves.”  
  
“But it is his privilege,” Narcissa said, leaning back in her chair and clasping her hands on her lap. Her plate vanished as well. “The way he chooses to live. The way he puts up with not having that respect. And you know every variation of those moods. What is it that plagues you now?”  
  
Draco hesitated. There had been a time when he had thought he could tell his mother everything. Then he had thought it was nothing. Now he knew the truth lay somewhere in between, but he could not always tell where the line lay.  
  
Narcissa’s eyes only grew brighter, and she leaned forwards. Draco knew then that he might as well confess as much as he had set up.  
  
“I think I have a means of promoting my business,” he said.  
  
Narcissa tilted her head to the side, and, just like that, Draco’s triumph became a small vanishing point of light.  
  
“There are other things you could do,” she said, so gently that it hurt like a knife in the gut. “You could achieve your own political position in the Ministry. There are people who would listen to you, people who would place money in your hands if you made speeches. And I have told you about the artifacts that my family stored in hidden places which might—”  
  
“ _No_ ,” Draco snapped. “I’ve told you before, Mother. I want freedom on my own terms, not the terms of the family.”  
  
“You can’t escape the blood in your veins,” Narcissa said, “though it seems that you oftentimes try. What I am giving you is a means of being less ashamed of it.”  
  
Draco took several deep breaths before he could answer. “Yes,” he said, “perhaps you are. And perhaps I’m the one who’s violating the terms that you taught me, and who’s disloyal to ideals I should believe in.”  
  
Narcissa’s tiny arch of her neck said that she had always believed that, and was glad that Draco was finally coming around to the side of wisdom.  
  
“But it’s still what I want,” Draco said. “Not respect, the way Father does—or no respect but his, which he’ll never give me while he thinks of me as a possession. But freedom. The freedom to act as I will, to make money in my own way. If I’m going to coerce them, let me at least coerce them in my own name.”  
  
He finished, and shut his eyes while his mother looked at him in wonder. He hadn’t meant to show his dreams like that. His mother would treat their exposure much like the exposure of undergarments.  
  
“But who gave you those dreams, Draco?” she asked at last, her voice as soft as the banners that Mrs. Wade had hung at her party last night. “Who taught you that those things mattered? Not me. Not your father. I know that your professors at Hogwarts only spoke to you like that when they were trying to entice you to join Dumbledore’s side of the war. You didn’t learn it from your yearmates, since you were intelligent enough not to listen to the ones who weren’t in Slytherin. Where did it come from?”  
  
Draco shook his head, eyes and mouth still shut. He couldn’t tell her about the burning desire that had grown in him during the war, when he had been nothing but a tool that the Dark Lord used to torture people. Sometimes other people, sometimes Draco himself, but never more than a tool. He could have been a whip; he could have been a hammer. Nothing more than that.   
  
He had changed. The more the yearning for freedom had to retreat into his heart, the more intense it grew. And he came out of the war with the desire to soar to a height from which he could overlook the world on his own, a desire that had only increased when he realized his father had no intention of granting him his wings.  
  
His mother was the best friend he had in the world. They understood each other at levels too deep for speech. But she was still unaware of this desire, or at least its beginning, and Draco wanted to keep it from her. He wouldn’t have shown her this passion, made the speech he had, if he’d been in possession of his senses.   
  
He waited until the silence grew gentler, and then his mother said, “I will not ask, if you prefer not to answer me.”  
  
Draco opened his eyes and saw her standing on the far side of the dining room, the way Lucius had come rather than the way he’d gone, leaning her hand against the door and studying him with wide, interested eyes.  
  
“But someday,” Narcissa continued, “you will need to speak of it, and then it might help if you had practice.” She hesitated, then added, as if it had suddenly occurred to her that she might need to, “I could never despise you, no matter what happened.”  
  
She went into the gardens, and Draco was left to lean his head against the back of his chair and breathe.  
  
 _I have a chance at freedom. And Potter is going to give it to me._  
  
*  
  
“I couldn’t believe that he got away.” Ron was shaking his head as he told the story of his latest adventure in trying to capture a Dark wizard. Sometimes it seemed to Harry that more wizards got away from him than he captured. “What kind of idiot climbs out a window he’d have to starve himself to pass and then over dozens of razor-edged wards?”  
  
Harry laughed because he knew Ron expected him to, and took another sip of Firewhisky. Right now, he was ordinary Harry Potter, drinking with his best friend in the kitchen of his best friend’s house. Ron was the only one home right now, since Hermione was staying late at the Ministry to work on a case. They’d had dinner together, and comfortable conversation. Or at least Ron had a comfortable running monologue, and Harry listened.  
  
He was ordinary Harry Potter on the surface. Under the surface, he was putting Lionel Truth together more and more by the moment. Now Lionel had weight and heft, and Harry knew the reason for his charming smile, for the way he moved, and that he was an excellent dancer and preferred wine to Firewhisky.  
  
Harry grimaced for a moment. He didn’t like wine much, himself. But when he was being Lionel, it would taste good in his mouth. That was the depth of his art, the thing he most loved and would never share with anyone, his precious secret.  
  
“Are you all right, mate?” Ron had picked up on the grimace.  
  
Harry chose _gentle reminiscence_ from the closet of masks that he kept for Ron and Hermione and looked up. “Just thinking about someone else who got away,” he said. “Remember when we confronted Pettigrew at Hogwarts?”  
  
Ron grimaced in turn and shook his head. “We should have killed him then and there and saved ourselves a lot of trouble,” he muttered. “Maybe Sirius would still be alive.”  
  
Harry nodded, and was sad, but the sadness bounced around the inside of his head like an echo in an empty room. Lionel hadn’t had a relative to lose. By the time his parents had died, he had convinced himself he had never cared much about them.  
  
“And Remus,” Ron went on, with a faraway look in his eyes. He started drinking more heavily, gulping from the glass, and Harry relaxed. Ron drank like that when he thought about the war. Hermione wouldn’t thank Harry if she came home and found her husband drunk, but it did lessen the chance that Ron would find out in any degree that Harry was in charge of Metamorphosis. “That was a _waste_. And Fred.” His voice hushed on the last name, and he stared into the glass.  
  
Harry reached across the table and took the glass away, so that Hermione couldn’t say he hadn’t tried. Lionel flinched at the smell of the Firewhisky and looked around for something finer. Harry put the glass on the table and cocked his head at Ron. “Did you want to go see Teddy? You look as if you need to.”  
  
“God, yes.” Ron surged to his feet and smiled at Harry. “You’re so good at reading people.”  
  
 _All part of the job_ , Harry kept himself from saying, and went to fetch his cloak.  
  
In his head, Lionel complained about the smell clinging to him and the taste in his mouth, and behind him, a hundred other people patiently awaited their chance to be born.  
  
*  
  
Draco grimaced and shook away the taste of candyfloss that seemed to spring into his mouth almost immediately whenever he arrived at Unruffled. It was the name of the place that did it, he was convinced. It seeped into the atmosphere, and made it almost as cloying and cutesy and coy as the person who had named it imagined it did.  
  
Unruffled had probably originally been a manor house, but was now a silver-colored palace, topped with twisted minarets that were for decoration only; there was no way they would support the weight of someone who might want to walk on them. In front of Unruffled was a placid, silver-blue lake, where white swans glided. Always pairs of swans, and never less than perfect. If not for the fact that Draco didn’t think Urania Talleyrand had the skill to create such glamours, he would have suspected them of being illusions, not real birds.  
  
The grass was perfectly neat and short, and such a flat green that Draco instinctively attempted to walk across it carefully, thinking it might be slick. It was covered with star-shaped white and golden flowers that looked no more real than anything else on the estate. Now and then a slender white birch would unfold from the darkness, with branches so delicate it looked as though one could snap them between a thumb and forefinger. Tame white deer wandered in all directions, looking at the world through big blue eyes. Draco had even seen unicorns, though he was _sure_ those were illusions.  
  
For the Midsummer’s Eve party, Draco was disgusted to note, Talleyrand had cast some spell that affected the sky itself. As soon as Draco passed through the spun-sugar gates, the sky turned a dark blue dotted with unrealistic silver stars, as though he was walking through the inside of a sapphire. Elves—not house-elves, but the delicate, impossible creatures that some people thought house-elves were descended from—giggled and danced in the bushes, shot the guests with heart-tipped arrows that didn’t hurt, and then faded away when someone came near. There were garlands of swaying flowers on the birch trees, around the necks of the deer, and—Draco gagged—around the necks of the swans that swam in solemn procession on the lake.  
  
It was really too much. Draco decided, as he strode past the lake and up to one of the numerous tables laden with glasses of wine, that he would not be responsible for his actions this evening if someone dared to comment on how pretty it all was.  
  
He scooped up a glass of wine and drank it without tasting. That proved to be a mistake. It tasted foul, and Draco spluttered several times until he managed to get himself under control. Then he turned around and scanned the crowd restlessly for Potter.  
  
He didn’t see Potter, but he did see someone else, who made him blink. “Blaise!” he called, as soon as he got over his surprise. “I thought you were out of the country.”  
  
Blaise loped up to him, grinning. He wore that grin at the most inappropriate moments, sometimes, but Draco was glad to see him. Blaise was one of the few people he had remained friends with after Hogwarts; Pansy was the other. At times he envied Blaise his freedom. Blaise had the power to travel to another country any time he wanted, since he had no great name to keep up and no restrictive parent. His mother enjoyed freedom and the benefits of it too much herself to restrict her only child.  
  
“I was,” Blaise said. “But I have to tell you, no one in Italy knows how to throw a proper Midsummer’s Eve party.” He reached out and picked up a glass of wine from a server carrying a tray past, so neatly that Draco doubted the server would notice it was gone until she reached her destination, whatever that was. “So I came back to England for the Starfire Nights.”  
  
Draco rolled his eyes. “Blaise, no one calls them that anymore.”  
  
“Yes, they do,” Blaise said. “I do. So that makes one more person than no one.”  
  
Draco fought to keep from putting his head in his hands, but it was hard.   
  
“Why are _you_ here?” Blaise asked. “I thought you said once that you’d never set foot at Unruffled unless they paid you.”  
  
“I’ve hired someone to help me market Malfoy’s Machineries,” Draco lied smoothly. That was truthful enough, after all, and that the person was Potter and the terms of the “hire” not exactly traditional need not concern Blaise. “He suggested that we make our debut at parties like this.”  
  
Blaise looked around in interest. “Well, that would be something different at Unruffled, at least,” he admitted. “Where is he?”  
  
Draco preserved a cool expression of superiority, because he was not sure that he wanted to admit that he had no idea what his hire would look like. Perhaps he could recognize Potter through a disguise afterwards, but Potter would probably take pains not to show any of his real traits tonight. “Coming.”  
  
He found out afterwards how accurate his words were.  
  
Something leaped the fence around the estate like a falling star and galloped madly towards them. Draco stared with his mouth open until he realized what it was, his eyes making sense of angles and edges of light.  
  
When he did, he felt like laughing.  
  
It was a tall man with a grey cloak blowing behind him, green eyes several shades lighter than Potter’s, and long, light brown hair that tumbled above the cloak. He rode a silver-shod unicorn— _a glamoured horse_ , Draco told himself, _it has to be a glamoured horse_ —and carried an enormous bunch of white flowers. He was simultaneously part of the atmosphere of Unruffled in a way none of the other guests were and a wild, total contrast to it.  
  
He tugged on thin strips of moonlight that encircled the unicorn’s head like reins, and the beast tossed its shining horn and jarred to a stop. Potter leaped off and bowed to no one in particular, or perhaps the entire circle of gaping spectators, and then tossed his bouquet of white flowers into the air. They grew wings as they rose, and a ring of sleet-colored butterflies fell down around him. Several of them clung to Potter’s hair and shoulders; others soared towards the buffet tables; more flew off towards the lake, where the swans arched their necks up to see them.  
  
The “unicorn” was cropping the grass. Potter patted its neck, which made Draco all the more sure that it was a horse, and then strode towards them. He halted an inch away from Draco and nodded familiarly. Draco managed to make himself nod back, but it was a near thing. He was dazed.  
  
 _Potter does know how to make a fucking entrance._  
  
“Greetings!” Potter said, his voice audible to everyone in sight without being loud. Draco couldn’t decide if that was glamours or just the way he had chosen to pitch his voice. There were probably lessons that could make you sound like that, though Draco had never taken them. “My name is Lionel Truth. I’m here to help a good friend of mine. I suspect that many of you have never heard of the business that he’s setting up, and that’s simply _wrong_. If it’s benefited me, what couldn’t it do for you?” He ducked his head and looked up at the watchers through lowered eyelashes.  
  
There was a delighted laugh, and Urania Talleyrand herself came forwards to take Potter’s hands. She was clad in floating white, of course, and there was a garland of silver flowers in her hair. Draco thought he saw one of the white flowers Potter had tossed up there, perhaps transformed back from a butterfly. She was shaking her head, and she returned Potter coy look for coy look.  
  
“Anyone who can do something like that is welcome here,” she said. “Even for an effort at promotion.”  
  
Potter ducked his head and kissed Talleyrand’s knuckles. “My dear lady,” he murmured. “I would have asked your permission, but of course that would have spoiled the surprise.”  
  
“Of course it would have,” she said, and squeezed his wrists again, peering into his face as though that would tell her who he was. “I’m delighted that you didn’t. And now, tell me. Is your name really Lionel Truth?”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
The thing was, when Potter said it, Draco _believed_ it. His voice was slightly deeper than Potter’s, his accent faintly different, but rich and full of fun. He sounded—in an indefinable way—like someone who had lived the kind of life that his clothes and actions and magic proclaimed he had.  
  
“Then doubly welcome,” said Talleyrand, “for giving my little party something of the ornament of the absurd.” She curtsied to him, spreading her robes wide around her, and then glided off.  
  
There was a prompt explosion of talk and laughter. Potter—Draco found it simpler to keep thinking of him that way, rather than granting him the name he had adopted—turned to face Draco and nodded.  
  
“We were going to discuss promotion efforts,” he said. “Did you want me to tell them how Malfoy’s Machineries has changed my life, or did you want something a bit more subtle than that?” His outrageous, conspiratorial smile said that he knew he had already dug subtlety’s grave, with the way he entered.  
  
 _This isn’t Potter_ , Draco thought, even as he knew it was and forced his mouth to respond to Potter’s conversational gambit. _Potter can’t lie so perfectly. He can’t subsume himself so perfectly._  
  
But the evidence of the Wades’ party said he could. Draco knew that he would never have suspected Miranda Goldreyer of being other than she was if he hadn’t happened to see that one movement from the corner of his eye. Even then, he hadn’t been sure.  
  
 _Potter is an actor._  
  
He was, but it caused a strange mix of emotions in Draco, even though at the moment it was helping him. Admiration for Potter’s powers. Wonder that he had never done the same thing in school to get out of trouble, if it was so easy for him.  
  
Uncertainty about what would happen next.  
  
*  
  
“You might as well tell them how it changed your life,” Malfoy said, and his eyes added a final murderous comment: _Since this is all made-up anyway_.  
  
Harry wanted to laugh giddily, and wasn’t sure if that was his merriment or Lionel’s. Really, Malfoy should have known how it would be. He had hired someone from Metamorphosis, someone who could _help_ him. The quiet personas Harry could have called up wouldn’t have done anything worthwhile, and of course having the famous Harry Potter beside him would make everyone stare and ask how Malfoy had managed _that_ , concentrating on Harry instead of the products.  
  
 _I hate it when they concentrate on me._  
  
But, like this, he could walk among them and no one would ever know he was there. And he had spent the day becoming familiar with Malfoy’s Machineries. One of Lionel’s key traits was that he could quickly acquire superficial expertise, enough to sound knowledgeable in the face of people who didn’t know much about the topic. He was going to do that now.  
  
He turned around, considering whether they had a big enough audience to begin, or whether he should do something to attract attention. There was Blaise Zabini, of all people, and a scattering of pure-blood witches and wizards that Harry recognized from other parties, including some who had hired him in the past. And Urania Talleyrand continued to linger nearby, only distracted as necessary by people coming up to tell her how much they enjoyed the party. That was more than enough to begin with.  
  
Harry struck a dramatic pose, lifting his arm above his head and snapping his fingers. Another bouquet of flowers was in his hand in instants, this one dark blue. He would have blushed with embarrassment to do something like that in an ordinary situation, no matter how powerful his magic was, but Lionel loved being the center of attention. He turned in a slow circle, so everyone could see how big the flowers were and note the silver centers. There were a few low laughs of anticipation.  
  
“You see this?” Lionel asked in his soft, eager voice. “Anyone can conjure flowers. The trick is keeping them alive around the house after they’ve been brought into existence. A vase and water? Anyone can try that, but most of the time it doesn’t work. So how do you do it?”  
  
“Most of us use house-elves.” That was Mary Auburn, a sniffy witch whom Harry had worked for before and didn’t like. She had wanted someone from Metamorphosis only to appear as arm-candy at several parties, and Harry’s skills were worth more than that.  
  
“The ones who can afford it do so, certainly.” Harry tilted his head in respect at her. “But what about the half-bloods and Muggleborns who can’t, or who don’t have the good fortune to inherit house-elves? Even some pure-bloods are in that situation.”   
  
The crowd shifted smugly, mentally dividing the universe into two kinds of people, those who could afford house-elves and those who couldn’t, and placing themselves on the right side of that line. Harry turned again in a circle, still waving the flowers, though less hard this time because he didn’t want the petals to fly off. That would do his demonstration no good whatsoever.  
  
He caught a glimpse of Malfoy watching him, eyes so intent that they would have been uncomfortable under any circumstances. Harry grinned at him. _Probably wondering how in the world I can do this and get away with it._  
  
Leaving him to wonder, Harry reached out and took the vase he’d purchased that afternoon from a knapsack on his shoulder. The knapsack was glamoured to appear as part of his robes until he opened it, and then the watchers noticed. That was important. Harry didn’t want them to believe that he’d conjured the vase like the flowers. This was Malfoy’s product, and he had to promote Malfoy’s business.  
  
The vase was simple in form, a crystal affair with a rose worked into the side. It appeared to have no magic about it. Harry admired the skill in that. Malfoy had probably decided that few pure-bloods who would buy his products wanted something ostentatious, and many others would probably want it to seem as if they simply had the ability to perform whatever minor miracles they wanted, rather than the ability to invest in powerful spells.  
  
“Now, watch,” Harry said, and placed the stems of the flowers carefully in the vase.  
  
There was a soft gurgle, and a mild sparkle that could easily be taken as light playing off the water that the vase was filling with. Harry smiled and turned around in another circle so that everyone could see that the water was spreading out from the bottom of the vase, rising until it was a neat distance beneath the lip, and then stopping.  
  
“This vase is designed to keep flowers alive,” Harry said. “No matter what.” He turned the vase over.  
  
The flowers didn’t fall out, and neither did the water. In fact, they only swayed a little, like the toys on a mobile pushed slightly by inquisitive fingers. The vase sparkled more brightly, and the flowers appeared to grow healthier.  
  
“That’s impressive,” someone admitted, far enough back in the crowd that Harry couldn’t easily see his face. Harry smiled Lionel’s smile. _That’s so he doesn’t have to look like a fool if this doesn’t work_. “But what happens if someone smashes the vase?”  
  
“Show them, Truth,” Draco said, his voice so cool that part of Harry’s admiration shifted to him.  
  
Harry set the vase down and backed away several steps, then aimed his wand at the vase. “ _Reducto_!”  
  
The spell flew towards the crystal. It bulged when the magic hit it, and sparkled more brightly than ever, but it didn’t shatter. In fact, the sparkles won, and the last, lingering traces of the spell in the air vanished.  
  
Several people applauded, looking less embarrassed about doing so because Urania Talleyrand was leading them all. “Splendid!” she called out. “But how has it changed your life, exactly, Mr. Truth?” She smiled at him in a way that let him know she suspected that wasn’t his real name.  
  
 _Suspect all you like_ , Harry thought, smiling back. _After he finishes helping Malfoy, Lionel Truth vanishes, more’s the pity._  
  
“Well,” Harry said, lowering his voice confidingly and looking around as though he was afraid of someone overhearing. The circle around him promptly drew tighter. That trick worked almost every time. “I’m too poor to have house-elves, you see. I know my place.” He lowered his eyes modestly. “But I do like to have a fine house and fine clothes and general finery around the place. This lets me have them, while at the same time not expending a lot of money or time or energy trying to obtain something that I shouldn’t have anyway. It’s removed a small but permanent worry from the back of my mind.”  
  
Heads nodded. They would be more impressed by that than by more extravagant claims, Harry knew. Pure-bloods were willing to pay a lot for convenience, or rather not to be inconvenienced.  
  
“And in the meantime,” Harry said, “I can give you testimonials about other things, if you’re interested in them.” He fingered the cloak over his shoulders, which had also come from Malfoy’s shop, and then paused. “But I think I’ll leave you to think about it and experience it for yourselves.” Not too much at first, he judged. This crowd would resent being pushed in a certain direction. Harry would offer the option, dangle the temptation, and then leave it to them to decide what they wanted to do. “I’m always here if you have more questions, of course.” He swept a flourishing bow and turned towards the food tables.  
  
People started to call out inquiries about prices and manufacturing ability, but Harry laughed and shook his head. “ _Those_ are the sorts of questions you should direct towards the owner,” he said.  
  
They shifted to Malfoy. Malfoy straightened and met them. Harry watched him with the same sense of detached admiration he used when he thought about the spells Malfoy put on his inventions. _He’s very good at what he does._   
  
Malfoy, as busy as he was with giving out information and defining his inventory, found time to give Harry another of those long, intent stares. Harry shrugged back and picked up a plate of food. Malfoy could stare all he liked. It wasn’t as though he didn’t know exactly who Harry was and why he had agreed to do this, and he couldn’t want more specific information about Harry’s glamours and Transfigurations than Harry could want about his spells on objects. It was enough that both existed and were good.  
  
Besides, he was still working for Malfoy, in a way, even as he ate pasties and biscuits with tiny bits of white chocolate in the middle. He was flirting scandalously with Urania Talleyrand, and where she drifted and laughed and bestowed her attention, other people would follow.  
  
And yet Malfoy went on staring.  
  
Harry rolled his eyes. _What else did he imagine he’d buy for blackmail? My undying love?_  
  
*  
  
“Do you have a ring that cleans itself and doesn’t tarnish?” The woman in front of him, one of the Ullertons from Draco’s observation of her face, although he couldn’t remember her name offhand, ran one lock of dark hair through her fingers and smiled at him. “Or haven’t you made such things yet?” Her expression said that she thought him incapable of doing so.  
  
“Of course I have,” Draco said. He hadn’t come prepared with all the goods that he thought, or hoped, people might want to buy from Malfoy’s Machineries after Potter was done; it would be useless, since he would always leave out something that they might request. But he had brought a pamphlet, and he pulled it out and turned to a page that displayed an excellent photograph of a silver ring. “Rather like this?”  
  
The Ullerton witch frowned and looked just the slightest bit disappointed as she bent forwards to study the photograph. Then she sighed and said, “Yes, although that one looks rather small for my fingers.”  
  
“They self-size, of course,” Draco said smoothly, watching from the corner of his eye as Talleyrand laughed like a braying donkey. Potter bore it well, and in fact said something else that set her off again. Talleyrand’s flowers had slid down her head, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was totally involved in Potter’s conversation.  
  
The man was unnerving, Draco thought. Somehow he had changed, and Draco didn’t know how.  
  
It was silly, when he thought about it in more rational terms, his expectation that he would know if Potter changed greatly from the man he’d been in school. Why should he? They were separated by years of growth and years of growing stability in the wizarding world, where most people had tried to shove the war behind them and get on with their lives. And if Potter was such a good liar, then Draco couldn’t blame himself for being taken in by his deception like everyone else.   
  
But still the conviction was there, and if he didn’t know where it came from, he still had to work around it.  
  
“Do you have cloaks?” That was Blaise, pressing forwards with a bland expression on his face and wildly sparkling eyes, pretending he was just another customer. Draco looked at him warningly, and Blaise nodded. “So you don’t, then.”  
  
“Yes, we do.” Draco produced another pamphlet, and gave it to Blaise when he showed no inclination to lean forwards. Blaise had such a grave look as he gazed down at the pamphlet that Draco ground his teeth. He was going to ruin the game if he didn’t watch out.  
  
But other people were asking other questions now, and Draco had to answer them—questions about bathtubs, about other clothing and jewelry, about the vase that Potter had demonstrated, about sinks that washed their own dishes, and about machines that he didn’t have yet but could create with a minimum modification of spells. He had no time for worrying about Blaise or keeping an eye on Potter.  
  
When he next got a breather and could look around, it was to see the objects of his worry together. Blaise was speaking to Potter in a casual, friendly manner that wouldn’t have fooled anyone who knew him, nodding even before Potter replied to his questions. Draco drifted in their direction, and paused to choose among the food close enough that he could hear every word.  
  
“Truth,” Blaise said. “I don’t remember hearing of anyone with your name.”  
  
“Well, of course you haven’t,” Potter said, in that generous false voice that he seemed to have adopted because it could convince almost anyone of almost anything. “I’m not a pure-blood. And I’m afraid my father was—” he glanced around theatrically, then lowered his tone “—a Muggle.”  
  
“Even then,” Blaise said, “you have to admit it’s an unusual name. Especially when combined with your first one.”  
  
Draco winced. _Lionel. Yes, indeed. Potter, why couldn’t you have chosen someone who was a bit less flamboyant to represent me?_  
  
But the answer came almost immediately, and it was so obvious that Draco couldn’t have asked Potter to do anything else in good conscience. _Because someone less flamboyant would have sold less of your products_. Draco was certain that he would make several sales tonight, and all to pure-bloods, which would boost his profile immensely.  
  
Potter laughed, and his laughter wasn’t false or affected in any of the ways that Draco had been trained to listen for. Whoever Potter had chosen to give him lessons in acting and control of the voice, Draco thought absently as he chewed on his pasty, that person had been _good_. “Yes, that was my mother’s fault. She was so excited at marrying someone with the last name of Truth that she chose an unusual first name to complement it.” He shook his head. “I have thought of changing it, but then I wouldn’t really be the same person. Your name defines so much of your personal identity, don’t you find?” He leaned in towards Blaise the way the Ullerton witch had bent to read the pamphlet.  
  
Blaise danced a little backwards, a small line of contempt curving the corner of his mouth. Draco knew what he was thinking. Someone who believed that would believe many other things, none of them probably that sane. “I don’t find it so, no,” Blaise said. “But there are plenty of beliefs in the world.”  
  
“Yes,” Potter said, shrugging and taking a bite of a tiny sandwich on his plate. “And those are mine.”  
  
Blaise still had a half-meditative look, but he left Potter alone and nodded to Draco. “Good luck,” he said. “Your products do look expensive.” And with that ambiguous tribute, he wound his way back into the crowd.  
  
Draco stepped towards Potter and lowered his voice. “Does anyone here suspect you?”  
  
“Of course not,” Potter said, still using Truth’s voice. Draco found himself unaccountably irritated. The other night, he had sounded like himself, and not like Miranda Goldreyer, at least once Draco found him out. “Why would they? I familiarized myself with your products thoroughly. Anyone would swear that I’ve used them for years, except your business hasn’t been around for years.”  
  
“Not that,” Draco said. “I meant, does anyone suspect—the other thing.”  
  
Potter laughed again. “What other thing would that be? I assure you I’m not your friend, and no one has questioned me on the depth of our acquaintance. But I can make up a plausible lie if they do.”  
  
“Who you _are_ ,” Draco hissed. He couldn’t believe it was so hard to drag an acknowledgment out of Potter that he was playing a role. He seemed to vanish inside it so completely, as if he abandoned himself to it.  
  
 _Why_? When they were in Hogwarts, Draco had thought that no one else was as indomitably individual as Potter was.  
  
“I’m Lionel Truth,” Potter said, and there was a slight, mean pleasure in his eyes for a moment. Then it vanished, and it was Truth who patted Draco’s arm and said, “Don’t worry about it. The rumors of how I arrived and what I said should have spread into the rest of the party by now. I’m going to follow them and see if I can sell anything.” And off he went.  
  
Draco stared fixedly at his back. His hand slowly closed on his plate, and he didn’t notice or care, until he was startled by the sound of something ringing. He blinked, looked foolishly at the ground, and realized that he had broken a chip off the porcelain edge of the plate.  
  
“Tsk, tsk, Draco,” Blaise murmured, standing beside him with another full wineglass and a devilish grin. “Anyone would swear that he’s an old lover of yours who agreed to be here under duress, the way you look at him.”  
  
Draco scorched Blaise with a glance. His friend was one of the few people in the wizarding world who knew that Draco liked to sleep with men as well as women. “Only one half of that statement is true,” he said.  
  
“He was your lover?” Blaise let the wineglass dangle from his fingers and whistled softly. “What’s he like in bed?”  
  
“Ferocious,” Draco said, knowing that this was foolish and not caring. Potter would surely feel insulted when Blaise went up to him with this information, the way Draco knew he would. But not insulted enough to reveal his identity, Draco thought. He might as well get some revenge for the moments of uneasiness Potter had handed him tonight. “An _experience_.” Blaise’s eyes grew dark, and Draco laughed outright. “You covet him?”  
  
“He’s handsome,” Blaise said. “And it’s more than that. I know he _means_ to be charming, and it ought to put me off, but it doesn’t.”  
  
Draco nodded, wordless. He knew exactly what Blaise meant. Who would have known that Potter bore that seed of glory within himself, the light that could draw other people to him based on the sound of his voice alone?  
  
 _Maybe it’s not Potter who has it, but Lionel Truth._  
  
Draco frowned. He had heard of serious actors who became absorbed in their roles, to the point that they lost sleep over the character’s problems or refused to eat food that their character had an allergy to. Could something similar have happened to Potter? When he was on the job, he _was_ the person he imitated, even if that person didn’t exist?  
  
 _That would explain my irritation. I thought I was hiring Potter, but I only hired one of the people he can be._  
  
“If you don’t care,” Blaise said casually, watching Draco’s face the whole time, “and you’re thoroughly done with him, I might take a look.”  
  
Draco just nodded. One of the reasons Blaise spent a lot of time in other wizarding communities was that he had a disdain for England’s disdain of anything other than plain heterosexuality. “Do as you like. Don’t expect him to accept you without question, though.”  
  
Blaise sauntered away, grinning. Draco watched him go, and tried to comfort himself by thinking about what would happen when straight little Potter was suddenly confronted with the implication that he’d been Draco’s lover, and no easy way to deny it.  
  
 _That is enough_ , Draco thought as he turned back to answering questions. _Revenge will have to be, because God knows Potter won’t give me anything else._  
  
*  
  
“Truth.”  
  
Harry turned around. He had been trying to coax people into asking more definite questions about Malfoy’s products, but it seemed all they wanted to talk about was his arrival at the party and the spells he had used to conjure the flowers. He would have shaken his head at their backwardness if he hadn’t thought that doing so would jeopardize sales of Malfoy’s Machineries.  
  
“Yes?” he asked, when he saw Blaise Zabini standing there. “Did you want to know more about Malfoy’s Machineries?” Of course he knew the man was a friend of Malfoy’s and would have probably already heard all there was to hear, but Lionel would hardly know that.  
  
“No,” Zabini said, with a slow smile that Harry could have found attractive under different circumstances. “I’m here for another reason.” He paused, but both Lionel and Harry would have politely baffled expressions at this point in the conversation, so Harry maintained his. “I know you were Draco’s lover,” Zabini went on, lowering his voice. “I wonder if you’re interested in becoming mine.”  
  
Harry understood what had happened at once. Malfoy, not content with blackmailing him, wanted to humiliate him. He thought Harry would begin to hyperventilate the way most people raised in the wizarding world would have—the way Ron would have—and refuse in a fit of self-righteousness. Or else he would have to stand there and be uncomfortable, because contradicting Malfoy’s lies would make Zabini too curious.  
  
Luckily for Harry and Malfoy both, Harry had been comfortable with his sexuality for six years. He looked at Zabini for a long, silent moment, and made sure that Zabini saw his appreciation, before he shook his head. “I’m not looking for a regular lover right now,” he said. “I have certain requirements, and most people can’t meet them.”  
  
Zabini’s pupils dilated. The pulse at the base of his throat was beating faster now. “Tell me what they are,” he said in a husky voice. “Merlin knows I’d try to meet them.”  
  
Harry concealed a snort with some effort. Did Zabini think that perhaps Harry wanted to be tied to the bed? Well, time to disillusion him without betraying the fiction of his and Malfoy’s former acquaintance _or_ experiencing the discomfort Malfoy had intended for him.  
  
“Someone who wants more than just sex,” Harry said, and then turned away as a young witch came up to ask him questions about the crystal vase. Zabini had the sense to wait until she was done before he spoke up again.  
  
“I could do that,” he said. “For the right person.”  
  
Harry found the grin coming to him more easily this time. “I’m sure you could,” he said. “But I don’t want you to force your soul into contortions for the sake of lying down with someone who might disappoint you. This face conceals more than you know.” _Like a scar and a past that you already know about._  
  
“How do you know that I mostly want sex?” Zabini cocked his head, his voice sounding far more interested than insulted.  
  
“You mean, I need some other indication than the way you didn’t deny it when I suggested it?” Harry asked.  
  
Zabini laughed. “Honestly, I do date, but I don’t see the sense in promising forever. We don’t know when we might turn into different people. I could wake up tomorrow and decide that my lover doesn’t attract me anymore. Am I supposed to lie about that, or let them labor under a delusion?”  
  
“Some people think forever is more than just a fantasy,” Harry murmured, despite his private agreement with Zabini’s position. He could never give himself to one person, because he would _always_ turn into a different person tomorrow.  
  
“And you do, too.” Zabini sighed regretfully. “Well, as you wish. But do let me know if you change your mind.” He winked, and then turned away and sauntered off, perhaps in search of more willing prey.  
  
Harry saw him leave the party with the young witch who had asked the question about the crystal vase, in fact. He smiled. It was nice to know that, while some things were forever forbidden to him by the nature of his past and his job, other people could find happiness.  
  
*  
  
Draco glared at the letter Potter had sent him. It was utterly anonymous, with the writing disguised by a charm that Draco had already tried to penetrate and failed.   
  
_Do you wish me to promote your products again at the Haggertons’ party or the Kellisons’?_  
  
It was signed _Lionel Truth._  
  
Blaise had come back from his little conversation with Potter full of regrets, but not laughter. Potter had convincingly faked being gay, and never given a sign of himself away to someone who had known him at school—though, Draco had to admit, Blaise had probably never watched Potter the way Draco had.   
  
Which meant he was gay—  
  
Or could pretend he was.  
  
Draco shut his eyes and leaned back in his chair. _That’s the crux of it. I can’t be sure of anything with him. How am I to know that he resents having to help me? The sound of this letter is that he doesn’t._  
  
He sighed, sat up, and wrote his reply. He wanted Potter’s “help” at both the Haggertons’ and the Kellisons’, as they were the two most important parties remaining before Midsummer’s Eve itself. He hoped that his letter at least made Potter frown a bit in disappointment and mourn his lost freedom.  
  
 _And meanwhile, I may hope to have mine._  
  
New orders were coming in ever since Potter had done his promotion work at Unruffled, several from pure-bloods who had attended the party there. Potter had done his work. Draco had no cause to complain of his behavior.  
  
Which didn’t explain the discomfort and dissatisfaction sifting through him like volcanic ash through the air.  
  
 _I thought I knew him. I really didn’t._  
  
Draco ended up folding Potter’s letter and putting it carefully away so that he would know where it was if he wanted it. He had other letters to write, contracts to negotiate, and new machines to design. He was moving closer and closer to the point where he would have his freedom because he could declare his economic independence of his parents, if for no other reason.  
  
The dissatisfaction remained in the back of his mind nevertheless, like a cold he couldn’t shed.


	3. Chapter 3

  
  
“But you can’t tell me what he ultimately wants?” Harry leaned back in his seat and pouted. He had adopted the persona of another woman, Jackie Sheldon, who only existed when he needed to gather information. She was small enough, with wide eyes and a timid face, that skittish people didn’t feel threatened by her. She could ask questions that would get other people looked at suspiciously, and most of her listeners would simply assume that she didn’t know better. “That’s too bad.”  
  
“What does any Malfoy want?” The wizard she was speaking to, who had only given his first name—Leon—lowered his head and peered at her sideways. Jackie gave her very best flirtatious smile in return. “Power, of course,” Leon finished, seeming to have concluded that she really didn’t know. “And money. I suspect that he’s going to get as much of both out of Malfoy’s Machineries as he can, and then abandon it and go do something else.”  
  
“But there are easier ways,” Jackie said, rising to her feet as if she’d leave the table. “And if you can’t tell me why he didn’t take them…”  
  
“Wait,” Leon said, reaching out a hand to detain her. Jackie eyed his hand, but he didn’t actually touch her, and so she sat back down and tossed her black hair over one shoulder, watching him expectantly. Leon licked his lips and seemed to consider what he could tell her. “It’s his father, I think,” he said at last. “Malfoy—the younger one, I mean, the one we were talking about—”  
  
 _I remember that, considering you spoke the words less than a minute ago_ , Harry thought, while he smiled behind Jackie’s mask of blissful stupidity. _You must have a poorer opinion of her intelligence than I thought._  
  
“Malfoy wants his father’s respect,” Leon said. “Or maybe he just wants to inherit. Doesn’t everyone who’s pure-blood want that?” For a moment, he looked wistful. Then he sighed and seemed to let it go. “If he offends his father badly enough, then his father will disown him. I think that’s one reason he’s so careful. He’s trying to do what he can to retain his father’s good opinion while he also builds his own fortune. Maybe there’ll be a final confrontation at the end, whenever he has enough to content him, or maybe he’ll decide that it’s enough as long as his father acknowledges that he’s clever. I really don’t know. But if you want to know why he hasn’t broken free yet, that’s most likely why.”  
  
Jackie thanked the man by flirting with him some more, and then turned and made her way out of the Leaky Cauldron. Admiring eyes followed her all the way. She was aware of them, and she could have used them if she wanted. But she had all the information she needed for tonight.  
  
When she reached the street, she took a moment to check that no one was following her. She’d got very good at that when she first ran away from her parents, who would have given a lot to track her down. Then she stepped into the shadows and Apparated home.  
  
Harry landed on the doorstep of Number Twelve Grimmauld Place and let Jackie melt away from him like a mask of rainwater. He opened the door with a tap of his wand and stepped inside, closing it behind him. Then he made his way towards the small sitting room on the first floor. He wanted to sit and think, preferably with a glass of something warm in his hand.  
  
Kreacher appeared beside him and bowed. “Does Master Harry want a glass of mulled wine?” he asked.  
  
Harry smiled at him. “I’m not in the mood for that tonight, Kreacher. Warm pumpkin juice will do just as well.”  
  
Kreacher looked at him with something like disapproval, but bowed again and vanished. He evidently thought that warmed pumpkin juice wasn’t posh enough for someone living in the life and house that Harry was.  
  
Ten minutes later, Harry pulled off the wig that he had used to imitate Jackie’s long hair and settled back against the couch. He had already removed the glamours, the Transfiguration that gave him breasts and a shorter figure, and the charms that rendered his scar invisible for the duration of the evening (a hard process, and one that he didn’t want to use except when he had to, for a persona who emphatically had an unmarked forehead). He had left the wig for last because it was the least difficult thing he had to do.  
  
He shut his eyes and basked in the warmth of his fire and drink for long moments before he began to think.  
  
Leon was the sixth person he’d asked about Malfoy, and all the answers were similar. Malfoy had never made a move to challenge his parents, but everyone assumed that he would, someday, once he had either enough money or enough political power to be a threat on his own. That no one could name a single political contact of his wasn’t enough to prevent them from having theories. After all, he knew a lot of pure-bloods, including those who were still powerful in the Ministry, and he was working himself into a position where he could do favors for people. That added up to “politics,” in a lot of people’s minds.  
  
Harry shook his head. They didn’t know as much as they thought they did. Politics were deeper and stronger and stranger than that. Only a few of his personas were political powers, because setting up the contacts and the exchange of letters and the credit that would make the contacts trust him took so much _time_. If Malfoy had had a fraction of the power that people believed he did, he wouldn’t have needed Harry’s help to promote his business. He could have asked one of his allies to make his machines popular, and that would have happened.  
  
So Harry distrusted the answers he’d received so far, though he had little except his intuition to make him do so. But his intuition was powerful, and had saved him from far more scrapes than reason and logic had. (Of course, it was best when the two of them could work together, instead of opposed). Therefore, he was sure that there had to be _something_ wrong with the answers he had received.  
  
Not deliberate untruths. He knew how to spot lies. But it seemed as though people were taking the default state pure-bloods in general, or the Malfoys in particular, occupied in their minds and projecting it onto Malfoy. He wasn’t as strong as they thought he was, or as devious. And Harry didn’t think he wanted the same thing they did, either.  
  
Harry wanted to understand the git so that he would be sure of slipping free of Malfoy’s net when he was done with him. Yes, probably the worst that would happen was him having to retire some of his personas for a while, but Malfoy’s learning about Miranda and Harry’s acting skills came too close to exposing the whole secret of Metamorphosis. Harry would do anything to protect that, including selective Memory Charms.  
  
But it was much better to know a prevention rather than a cure for the danger. Know Malfoy well enough, and Harry could fend this off and ensure that it never happened again.  
  
 _What does he want?_   
  
Harry bit his lip and shut his eyes. Lovely as the patterns of the firelight were, he needed to think without distractions.  
  
Malfoy was moving slowly, taking a lot of trouble, and building a power base that wasn’t the same as the established channels. He could have got what he wanted from an exchange of favors. He could have relied on his father. Instead, it seemed that he hadn’t done anything like that. Why was that? What did he want that couldn’t be got through those ordinary channels?  
  
 _Well, who do you know who’s pursued a similar path to him? What was their goal? It might be his goal._  
  
Harry gasped softly and opened his eyes when the answer came to him, simply and brutally clear.  
  
 _It sounds like me._  
  
Harry had taken the unusual step of going through Metamorphosis to realize his desires, instead of taking advantage of his name and its power. He could have been an Auror. He could have been the political powerhouse Lucius Malfoy had once been. He might even have made the Wizengamot or become Minister of Magic, if he had been determined enough.  
  
Instead, he chose the path of art, secrets that he couldn’t tell people, and actions that wouldn’t really make sense from the outside. Malfoy had done at least two of those; Harry could only say that the second didn’t fit because he didn’t understand what all of Malfoy’s secrets were.  
  
Harry had done it because he wanted freedom, a small and secret set of lives in the middle of the wizarding world that were just his own, since his ordinary life was lent to any wizard who wanted to live it in imagination.   
  
_If Malfoy wants the same thing…_  
  
Harry firmed his grip on the cup of pumpkin juice so he wouldn’t drop it and stared at the fire with wide, unseeing eyes. The images tumbled through his mind, and he became more certain of his conclusion the longer he sat there.  
  
 _That’s it. That has to be it. It really is._  
  
Malfoy had moved through those parties like an animal in a cage, now that Harry thought of it. He was always turning his head from side to side as if seeking someone or something that wasn’t there. He hadn’t asked for favors, although he could have. He had wanted to dance with someone he had never seen before, and he had attended the parties with reluctance, as if despising the traditions that said such things were mandatory.  
  
It seemed so like his own activities that Harry promptly had to caution himself. Maybe he was seeing similarities where none existed. Maybe Malfoy just happened to want a different kind of power, and Harry couldn’t see that because he didn’t know how the inner minds of pure-bloods worked.  
  
But he didn’t think so. He thought his conclusion was the right one.  
  
 _His options are more limited than mine. He can’t vanish into art like I can because his family would want to know where he was going—and maybe he doesn’t have an artistic talent. He wants his family to respect him, I do believe that, but he’s willing to push the boundaries because they would see making a living by business as vulgar. He’s trying to find his way out of the trap that circumstances cast him in, but he needs help to do it._  
  
Harry swallowed and opened his eyes to look at the fire again. One set of sparks was leaping out to almost char the carpet like a flame trying to escape from the rest. Kreacher appeared, mopped up the sparks before they could cause damage, and then vanished.  
  
 _If that’s the case, I want to help him._  
  
That didn’t reduce Harry’s embarrassment or resentment that Malfoy had blackmailed him. It didn’t mean that Harry was about to tell him the secret of Metamorphosis, how the actors hired at the parties and Ministry receptions and other social functions over the years had all been him. He didn’t want to go up and hug him and offer sympathy, either, in case it turned out that he was wrong or Malfoy didn’t want his secret known.  
  
 _But I can help him anyway. Yes, I think I can_.  
  
*  
  
Draco relaxed the moment he stepped inside Greater Kingdom, the Haggertons’ manor house. They reached the level of elegance and comfort that a place like Unruffled could only achieve in cheap imitation.  
  
A house-elf appeared next to him, glamoured like one of the tall elves that Talleyrand’s magic had created in the bushes three nights ago at Unruffled. “Will you come with me, sir?” it murmured, and accepted his cloak. “A table is waiting for you, and for your friend.”  
  
Draco bristled for a moment, wondering why Blaise or Pansy or whoever else it was hadn’t informed him of their intention to attend the party, and then remembered Potter. Yvonne Haggerton had been at Unruffled the other night, and would undoubtedly have seen Potter’s “Truth” disguise and decided that a close relationship must exist between them.   
  
The thought of sitting next to Potter part of the night was strangely heartening. Draco inclined his head to the elf and walked into the next room.  
  
If it was a room. The Haggertons had done such a careful job of glamour and Transfiguration that Draco was genuinely uncertain whether he was in the large dining room that he thought lay in this direction or outside, under a canopy of leaves. He glanced behind him and saw a large silver tree, leaning over the lawn where the tables stood and shading it. Around the trunk of the tree ran garlands of vines that he knew had never existed, with large nodding flowers that looked like morning glories except for their size and their color, purple striped with black. A silver bird spread its wings in the tree and sang fit to break the heart. The sounds of others, their wings opening and closing like silk fans, drifted down from the leaves.  
  
 _At the least, they must have Transfigured the birds from nightingales or canaries_ , Draco thought as he strolled further into the eating area. _But I don’t know if that tree is real._  
  
The tables were shaped like half-moons, the chairs placed a reasonable distance apart. Perhaps it was his family’s legacy of placing a small number of people in a large space, but Draco hated to be crowded when he sat down to dinner. Low music that sounded like a flute version of the silver birds’ songs drifted around the seats. Draco located the chair that glowed softly when he approached and sat down. The chair promptly molded itself to him, shifting gracefully, the wooden arms growing shorter and the cushions thicker.  
  
Next to him was Potter, of course, in the Lionel Truth guise. He nodded to Draco and reached over to lay a hand on his arm. “I realize that you sent Zabini to me with a tale,” he whispered. “But I’m not angry at you.”  
  
Draco blinked at him, uncertain what to say. He would have thought the words the prelude to a mocking comment, except that Potter’s voice was low and warm, and he wasn’t speaking in the hissing stage-whisper that would have attracted attention. At least the insult, if it came, would be private.  
  
“You see,” Potter said, tightening his fingers on Draco’s arm and rubbing back and forth, “I realize that you want the same thing I do.”  
  
“I do admire deception and acting skill,” Draco said. “But I’m not dying to do all that you can do.”  
  
Potter shook his head. “I want freedom. So do you.”  
  
Draco stared at him. _Someone must have—_  
  
And then he remembered that no one knew that much of the desires of his heart, not even Blaise, and certainly not his parents, who wouldn’t have a reason to speak to Potter anyway. Potter must have seen it somehow in Draco’s actions or demeanor, the way that Draco had recognized the fighting move from “Miranda” that confirmed Potter’s presence in his mind.  
  
“Who told you that?” he did still ask, on the faint hope that Potter wasn’t as clever as Draco might have to admit he was.  
  
“Oh, no one,” Potter said, mildly startled. The expression looked as though it belonged on Truth’s face, and Draco wondered how much he changed the minor things when he dressed up as someone else. “Miranda” had been very different, or so Draco thought, but then, he hadn’t had the chance to see many expressions from her.  
  
“Figured it out on your own, did you?” Draco kept his tone mildly acid as the salad appeared in a silver bowl in front of him. He kept one eye on Potter as he began to eat, but Potter used the correct utensils in the correct manner. Draco wondered who had taught him that. Of course, there were schools one could attend—mostly down-on-their-luck pure-bloods teaching Muggleborns who aspired to the finer things in life—but even more than the money and time, he wouldn’t have thought Potter had the interest.  
  
 _If he wants to imitate a pure-blood, he probably has to._  
  
“Yes, I did,” Potter said, sounding pleased with himself. His voice deepened and became Lionel Truth’s selling voice. “I thought you might enjoy a dance tonight, as an experience of freedom. I’ll dance with others, of course. I want to show that I can sell your machines subtly as well as with the open entrance. But the first dance is yours, if you want it.”  
  
Draco swallowed a piece of lettuce once and fought hard to control his coughing as he reached for the glass of water. “Potter,” he said at last, “you _do_ know what pure-blood society will assume about two men dancing together, don’t you?”  
  
“Of course,” Potter said.  
  
There was a courage in his eyes that Draco had never seen in anyone else’s when the topic came up. As if he had simply accepted the notion that he was gay, or could be considered gay, and had resolved not to be disturbed by it any more than he was by the color of the sky.  
  
Draco toyed with his fork for a moment, and then asked, “Why would you assume that I want that kind of taint to follow me?”  
  
Potter’s smile was small and bright and secret. “Because it’s another kind of freedom. They can’t touch you, not if you’re trying to build your own method of gaining power and money outside their structure. The only thing that might happen to you is your parents’ disowning you, and I don’t think that will happen, since you’re their only child and they have no close relatives to leave the money to.”  
  
Draco carefully pushed the salad aside and sat there in silence, thinking, until the first course appeared. It was fish glowing too brightly to be natural, and covered with a glazed sauce that made it appear golden. Potter, meanwhile, sat there as if he hadn’t a care in the world. He used the cutlery correctly on the fish, too.  
  
Draco said, “If I offend too many people, there’s a good chance they won’t buy the machines I want to sell them.”  
  
“That’s true,” Potter said. “And certainly an argument against dancing with me.”   
  
Draco took a quick glance at him, but Potter had his eyes shut as he savored the steam rising from the fish, and Draco could not actually tell his thoughts. “But you don’t think that’s an argument against it,” he ventured.  
  
“No,” Potter said, opening his eyes, “I don’t. Not if you spin this the right way.”  
  
“A tainted, social-climbing tradesman who doesn’t care what other people think of his sexuality?” Draco snorted. “I’m sure that will make them _flock_ to buy from me. Let alone invite me to their parties.”  
  
“No,” Potter said patiently. “You can _make_ them accept this. You can make them fascinated with you, and think of you as someone clever and daring and original, rather than harmful to their morals or to their notion of what raising a proper family is like.” Some tart bitterness on those last few words, which made Draco think he was hearing the real Potter for an instant. Then Potter turned his head, and it was Lionel Truth who looked at him. “Or do you think that you aren’t up to the challenge?”  
  
Draco’s cheeks burned. He was remembering the way Potter had ridden into Unruffled on a glamoured unicorn, using obvious cheap tricks, and still had people dancing attendance around him, and Urania Talleyrand herself interested.   
  
_No one’s ever going to say that I can’t do something Potter can do. Even if we’re the only two who would know._  
  
“Show me,” he said.  
  
*  
  
Harry liked the Haggertons’ Midsummer’s Eve party the best of any he attended. They always provided beautiful open spaces for dancing and plenty of good food, and he was as fond of one as of the other.  
  
But it was not often he had a perfect partner to dance with, especially since he had mostly attended the party in the guise of a date to someone who wanted to fool the world into believing they were perfectly heterosexual.  
  
This time, as he walked out onto the smooth, velvet-soft lawn of the dancing area, with Malfoy a step behind him, he was conscious of a thrill that worked its way down to his stomach from his throat. He had a worthy partner, and he was going to show everyone what two men dancing together could do.  
  
More to the point, he was going to _make_ them applaud a spectacle they would ordinarily turn away from in disgust.  
  
He faced Malfoy and dipped his head in a graceful bow. They were attracting attention, curious little squinted sideways glances. Malfoy nodded back, and Harry could practically hear the indrawn breath as a few people began to suspect what was coming. The rest of the party, of course, thought they had concluded some business matter and would part now.  
  
Harry raised his hands and held them out to Malfoy. Malfoy clasped them, looking at Harry in confusion. The music playing at the moment was a waltz, and he must wonder how they could make that dance original.  
  
Harry snapped his fingers.  
  
The glamour spell he’d prepared during dinner, in the breaks between courses, took effect. With a sharp little twang, the waltz music dropped and swung into the half-loping, half-galloping tune of the Arctica.  
  
Harry waited a moment to see Malfoy’s eyes widen before he smiled, released the git’s hands, and swung away into the turn that demanded he put his back to his partner. He could only hope Malfoy would have figured out, or decided, what he should do before Harry turned round again.  
  
The Arctica was a dance of first love, a dance between people who declared that they were going to marry at the end of the evening. Of course, most of the time, it was no such thing, and it had acquired a different social significance when its original meaning so rarely applied. It was a dance in which anything was possible. Enemies could dance together, or people who had been forbidden by the Wizengamot to ever speak to each other again, or people who had once been lovers and were now married to others. For as long as the music wailed and pivoted around the ballroom, the ordinary rules were suspended.  
  
It was the only dance during which Malfoy could possibly get away with dancing with a man.  
  
When Harry faced him again, he saw that Malfoy had recognized that and, from the sharp glitter in his eyes, that the prat intended to play his part.  
  
He stepped forwards, bowing to Harry as if they had shared dances like this before, as if they had planned all this, as if he were an actor of equal strength and skill. Harry laughed in his heart at the deception of the deception, but he appreciated the spirit that had inspired it. He stretched out his hand, and Malfoy gracefully took it.  
  
Grace wasn’t required by the dance, but speed was, and Malfoy’s training seemed to have included both. They leaped around each other, hooking arms now and then, feet often leaving the ground for a few minutes, either because they were _just that_ enthusiastic or because the Arctica called for lifted kicks. Malfoy was panting after a few minutes, which made Harry feel smug. _I must get more exercise than he does._  
  
They broke apart as the music stuttered, and then practically charged each other as it flared up again. Harry worried whether someone was disrupting his glamour, but then remembered that breaking of the music was a normal feature of the Arctica. He had danced to this music more recently than he’d listened to it.   
  
Malfoy clasped his arms around Harry’s waist and swung him in a circle. It was one of several possible interpretations, the boldest, and Harry found himself glad, once again, that it was Malfoy, someone so like himself—  
  
( _Well, in essentials_.)  
  
\--who had been the one to catch him. Harry locked his feet on the ground and swung Malfoy in turn. Malfoy went with it, his eyes half-shut and dreaming, his hair flying behind him like the mane of a wild horse.  
  
 _I was right_ , Harry thought as he dropped his arms from around Malfoy’s waist and then dropped into a kneeling position at his feet, extending his arms towards him. _What he wants most is freedom, and this is a tiny piece of freedom in a world far too crowded and mad for him most of the time._  
  
Malfoy came a single, delicate step forwards, hesitated like a courting peacock, and then laid his hands on Harry’s shoulders. Harry smiled up at him and folded his hands over Malfoy’s, lightly clasping his wrists. Malfoy shut his eyes, his lashes fluttering delicately. Harry rose to his feet, drawing Malfoy’s arms along with him, as the Arctica turned slow and cold, fitting its name for the first time so far this evening.  
  
Together, they swayed, as mindlessly as if they had been long-time lovers. Harry could feel the length of Malfoy’s body along his. If he was out of shape, it didn’t show in the firmness of his muscles or the strength of his arms. He was warm, and almost as tall as Harry, and if he was still sharp of feature, that was no worse than some of the other pure-bloods Harry dealt with, and imitated, on a daily basis.  
  
 _I could do worse for a partner, for a lover._  
  
That was a true statement. Harry isolated it in crystal because of that. It was _true_ , and so there was no need to think about it further.  
  
The Arctica dropped even lower, to a throb that Harry could feel in his wrists and the soles of his feet. Malfoy opened his eyes and tilted his head towards him, bringing his mouth close to Harry’s ear.  
  
“I think we’ve given them enough of a show,” he whispered. “How are we going to avoid sending them away in disgust?”  
  
Harry smiled and slipped back into the persona of Lionel Truth, who loved spectacle and being the center of attention.   
  
“I bear the burden,” he murmured. “Of course. I don’t really exist, do I? I’m going to do something in a few minutes. When I do, all you have to do is leap away and look disgusted. And that’ll do the rest.”  
  
*  
  
Draco thought he knew, from the devilish smile glinting on Potter’s face and in the disguised eyes, what he meant to do.  
  
What surprised him was his own impulse to protest.  
  
He shook his head—mentally, because Potter and the people watching him would notice if he did it physically—and let his head droop so that it touched Potter’s shoulder. The plan would work, would become perfect, because what Potter said was true. Lionel Truth didn’t really exist, and neither did Potter, when he wore a costume like this. He couldn’t be damaged by this, and he would ensure that Draco wasn’t.  
  
Draco simply wished there was a way to keep both the publicity that he would gain from this and the warm feeling of Potter’s body swaying in his arms, the soft breath echoing next to his ear.  
  
Potter made a protesting mumble, and Draco opened his eyes. The Arctica was finishing, in a cascade of notes that sounded as if they might have dropped from the trees.   
  
And Potter was leaning towards him, eyes brimful of trembling hope, his lips parted.  
  
 _That was it_. Potter would pretend to kiss him, and all Draco needed to do was shove him away and act disgusted. He could have figured that out even if Potter hadn’t given him his advice.   
  
And then Potter would find a way to spin things so that Draco would seem the hero of the hour and not a fool who had almost been seduced.   
  
Draco fought back his own strange reluctance and did it.  
  
He used a stiff arm to propel Potter away from him, so suddenly that Potter’s arms flailed and he landed on his back. The Arctica stopped, probably because Potter had canceled the auditory glamour that produced it. Loudly enough that people on all sides of the party could hear him, Draco announced in icy tones, “That’s rather far to go for a dare, isn’t it, Truth?”  
  
Potter picked up on the thread of his plan at once, and gave him a faint, answering smile before he arranged his face in an expression of hurt. The smile made Draco’s throat want to close up, and it was a struggle to maintain his cold, closed expression.  
  
“It wasn’t a dare,” Potter said. His voice was perfect, the quiver in it so subdued that you could almost pretend it wasn’t there—except that every pure-blood would be listening intently for it. “I wanted to—to touch you. Hold you. Kiss you.” He lowered his voice, as though he had forgotten the watching audience. Most people probably wouldn’t have believed that, except that it was the kind of thing someone in the throes of intense passion might do, and it had to be intense passion that would make one man try to kiss another in public. Draco’s admiration of Potter’s skills was growing. “I thought you knew that, or why would you agree to dance with me?”  
  
 _Burden on my shoulders now_. Draco was simultaneously irritated that Potter expected him to come up with the words for this and happy that he trusted him to do so.  
  
 _I am growing softer than I used to be_. Draco straightened his shoulders and stared into Potter’s eyes. Truth’s eyes. He would have to think of them that way if he didn’t want to forget himself in the middle of this speech.   
  
` “The Arctica is a dance where anything might happen,” he said. “And you’ve been a good enough friend to me in the past few days that I didn’t want to refuse what seemed a small favor. But when I realized what you wanted it for?” He curled his lip. He didn’t need to speak any more words. That gesture would be enough.  
  
Potter bowed his head. Just by that movement, and by hunching his shoulders a bit, he became more hopeless than anyone Draco had ever looked at. His control over his body was astonishing.  
  
 _I wonder what else he can control_? Draco’s mind wandered in the last direction anyone around him would think it should go, so once again he had to work hard to control his expression.  
  
“There’s nothing I can do, is there?”  
  
The despair in Potter’s tone was utterly real, or so it seemed. It was an effort for Draco to keep his jaw from falling open. Luckily, the expression of cold disdain this situation required was the one he had practiced most often in the last few months, because dealing with his father required it of him.   
  
“No,” Draco said. He turned away and walked towards the nearest table covered with wine, acting as if he could use a cup more than usual.  
  
From the muffled snorts and jeers behind him, he knew that Potter had risen and stumbled away. There was even a moment when it sounded as if he’d scraped against a doorway. He was leaving the party, alone and friendless, without the slightest chance that he would regain the friendship he had forfeited.  
  
Or so anyone would think.  
  
Draco hadn’t managed many steps before they were swarming around him, the pure-blood witches and wizards he had wanted to impress, talking of their sympathy in low tones and asking about his machines. Potter had been right. There was a certain cachet in being near someone who had come close to a scandal but escaped with a few cutting words.  
  
And the aspiring half-bloods and Muggleborns Draco expected to make up his best customers would buy the things they saw the pure-bloods buying, whether or not they heard about Draco’s social triumph or cared. Perhaps they _would_ hear. It was the sort of story the _Daily Prophet_ liked to print, telling the wizarding world of the “champions of tradition,” those wizards or witches who turned against “mere pleasure” for the “perpetuation of the race.”  
  
Draco knew the rhetoric. He had looked at article after article and spoken the words aloud, though he had slept with men as well as women before. It was what one expected. In reality, some of the younger pure-bloods, who had lost their faith in their parents’ generation and the old traditions, had lovers of the same sex, but the watchword there was _discretion_. Something like Lionel Truth had tried tonight would turn everyone against him.  
  
Not that that mattered, since Lionel Truth didn’t actually exist.  
  
 _That’s it. That’s why I don’t have to care. Potter will slide into another disguise and go back to whatever he does when he doesn’t work at Metamorphosis. Or he’ll play someone else, and I probably won’t even recognize him the next time I see him._  
  
“Is something wrong, Mr. Malfoy?” The witch in front of him, whom Draco vaguely recognized as belonging to the Patterson family, looked at him with concern.   
  
Draco, looking down, realized that he had caused a crack in his wineglass with the force of his grip. He took a deep breath and relaxed his hand. “I am thinking of consequences,” he said. “The specific and the general.”  
  
“Oh?” Her smile invited him to continue, but Draco didn’t want to. He smiled back and left her to consider his comment in whatever cryptic way she wanted to.  
  
Yes, Potter could leave anything behind. He could slip from one persona to another, one setting to another. Draco wouldn’t be surprised if he knew how to act right around people who were of a lower social class as well as pure-bloods. In fact, he was probably more at home with them, given his background.  
  
His attempt to translate his bitterness into anger about their past didn’t work. Again and again, his mind returned to that image of Potter walking away from the party, dropping Lionel Truth’s hair and eyes and cloak on the ground like a mask, and then Apparating into the company of friends who wouldn’t know what he had just been doing.  
  
Potter was free.  
  
*  
  
Harry smiled as he sat down beside his fire that night. He had rarely pulled off a more satisfying deception. It was true Malfoy hadn’t paid him, and Harry had lost some time that he would ordinarily have been devoting to choosing among the requests sent to Metamorphosis for his next case, but this had been so _different_.  
  
 _I do hope that Malfoy decides to use some other method than blackmail if he wants to hire me in the future, though_ , Harry thought, and sipped his warmed pumpkin juice.  
  
It was rare that he got to feel this kind of contentment. Most of the time, he felt the dazzling rush of excitement that came from inventing a persona or existing inside one, or the sick fear that someone would discover his connection to Metamorphosis and talk about it, or the dull boredom that came from being Harry Potter. Harry would have liked to feel this more often.  
  
 _Not at the price of more blackmail, though._  
  
Harry silently toasted the absent Malfoy, and hoped that he was enjoying himself as much at the moment as Harry was.  
  
*  
  
“I heard about what you did at the Haggertons’ party, Draco.”  
  
 _Strange_. Draco had been expecting a subtler first approach to the subject. He lifted his attention from his plate so that he could contemplate his father.  
  
“Sir?” he asked, when more moments passed and Lucius seemed to have settled for a frozen stare.  
  
“No amount of respect will remove this onus from you.” Lucius’s voice lowered further into disapproval. “You danced with a man, who then tried to kiss you.”  
  
“It was a dare,” Draco said patiently. He had lain awake last night rehearing his story until he could almost have believed it himself. “Yes, he challenged me to dance with him, thinking I would back away. I could hardly let him have the appearance of triumph over me. But then I refused to submit to his scandalous advances, and that gave me a victory over _him_. I don’t see why you should be concerned about this, Father,” he added casually. “Everyone at the party was entirely on my side, when they saw how it was.”  
  
Lucius leaned forwards. Draco studied him from the corner of his eye, because direct attention would cause too much suspicion at this point. His father’s face had a tinge of hard passion that he didn’t understand. If Lucius had brought the Haggertons’ party up at all, Draco had thought he would be angry that Draco was acquiring a reputation for selling machines like a Muggle tradesman.  
  
His mother sat at the end of the table and looked back and forth between them.  
  
“But you should not have entered such a situation in the first place,” Lucius said. “Why did you accept the dare? Who is this Lionel Truth person to you?”  
  
“Someone I used to know,” Draco said, with such perfect honesty that his father narrowed his eyes. “Someone who had also agreed to promote my products during the Starfire Nights. I thought I owed him the pleasure of a challenge.” He turned his head half away and managed a delicate shudder that he was proud of himself for raising. “I didn’t know what kind of pleasure he intended to take from it.”  
  
“Why should you be angry, Lucius?” Narcissa murmured. “Our son has achieved a certain reputation from this incident, as someone who can be trusted to uphold wizarding traditions. And he did not succumb to the clasp of a man who only wished to use him. I do not understand what about this incident places our name into disrepute.”  
  
Draco would have gaped at her if he dared. She had never taken his side before. But he thought it best to nod in mild agreement and look at his father, waiting for an answer.  
  
“It does not matter,” Lucius said. “I will not have you encouraging such childish notions as _dares_ , Draco.” His hands had relaxed on the table, but Draco knew better than to think their conversation was finished because of that. “Do you think it likely that you will see this Truth man again?”  
  
This time, it was Draco’s turn to clench his hands, though he was polite it enough to do it in his lap, out of sight.  
  
In truth, there was no reason for Potter to come near him again, even for the Kellisons’ party, the climax of the Starfire Nights and the most prominent and well-respected party held for the last few years. Why should he? He had done what Draco had demanded of him. Orders for Malfoy’s Machineries were pouring in. People had seen Lionel Truth humiliated in a very public way. Potter wouldn’t want to use that persona again, because he must suspect that no one would listen to him if he tried to speak. He had sacrificed it in order to help Draco.  
  
But Draco _wanted_ to see him again.  
  
And if Potter was the master of a dozen different faces and personalities, there was no reason that he could not dress up as someone else and come again. Particularly since the Kellisons’ party was a masked one.  
  
Still, that had little bearing on the answer to his father’s question, as, Draco told himself, he should have figured out given the wording. He would not see _Truth_ again, although he was determined to see Potter. So he looked up and shook his head. “His reign, if he had one, is at an end. And I would certainly never trust anything he says again.”  
  
Lucius took a shallow breath. “Good. Then I need not disown you.”  
  
Draco kept his face serene, but his soul screamed inside him. _This is what Potter has that I don’t. He might not have parents, but he has so much more freedom, and he has respect from the people who hire him and the people who know him as Potter, even me. He doesn’t have to worry about a father who can’t admit he made mistakes, who is involved in trying to live his life through me because he managed to screw it up the first time._  
  
“We never considered such a thing,” Narcissa said, surprising Draco again. “Accepting a dare is not a heinous crime.”  
  
Lucius looked at her this time, along with Draco, as if he could not imagine what he had done to bring about his wife’s opposition. Then he turned back to Draco and seemed to settle on ignoring Narcissa. “I expect you to uphold the family name with more honor from now on, Draco,” he said. “Is that clear?”  
  
Draco looked at him in silence. He had waited for so long to have some freedom from his father, freedom that he had _won_ , that he had _earned_ , rather than simply tricked from Lucius. That was one reason Draco had never spread rumors that Lucius was weak, or tried to disassociate himself from the family. He could have done that, yes, but he preferred to make Lucius acknowledge that he’d been wrong. That was the only way he could see the gleam of respect in his father’s eyes.  
  
Now, he wondered why he had been so intent on that respect. It was one thing to have esteem from people who mattered, who had ideals that you admired or power that you looked up to, but Lucius wasn’t one of those people.  
  
 _Not anymore._  
  
“Did you hear me, Draco?” Lucius repeated.  
  
 _I know now that I don’t have to win respect from him_ , Draco thought. _But I wish I could have learned that before I put so much effort into trying to gain it._  
  
“Perfectly, sir,” he answered, and then left the table as soon as possible after that without making it look as if he was running away. If he no longer wanted his father to look at him in pride and some recognition of Draco’s true, independent worth, he at least didn’t want him to despise him, either.  
  
Once he was back in his room, he reached for ink and parchment.  
  
*  
  
Harry considered the request in front of him with a dubious eye. On the surface, it was the same kind of work he had often done: acting as an escort to someone who had a lover of the same sex but needed his pure-blood parents to think he was straight, so that they wouldn’t deprive him of the money he should rightfully inherit.  
  
But there was a trick of wording in the message that displeased Harry. It sounded as though the young pure-blood man requesting a woman in this instance didn’t plan to treat the woman well. She would be only a temporary replacement for his real lover, the letter said three times, and she shouldn’t expect to do more than dance with him and perhaps eat one meal. She certainly wouldn’t be sharing a _bed_ with him, though she would have to work hard to convince his parents, who were already suspicious of his true preferences, that she was.  
  
 _As if someone from Metamorphosis would find a client so desirable that she would throw herself away on him_ , Harry thought, and rolled his eyes, and set the letter aside. He had plenty of other requests, and he always shut Metamorphosis down when he was working on a case, so that he wouldn’t be distracted (or tempted) by the idea of taking on two at once. There was no need to spend so much time preparing for a role he found disagreeable.  
  
Then another owl flew through the window of the small office that he used as the headquarters for Metamorphosis and alighted on the edge of the table. Harry sighed. From the size and beauty of the bird, it came from a pure-blood Owlery, and from the unfriendly stare it gave him, it blamed him for having to undertake the errand at all.  
  
“Hullo,” he said. “Deposit the letter there.”  
  
The owl’s stare grew more hostile.   
  
“Oh, of course.” Harry sighed again and dug into the drawer of his desk, pulling out a handful of owl treats. He placed them on the table in front of the bird and then picked up the next letter.  
  
Now this looked promising. This was a request for someone to act as a companion and source of amusement to the writer’s mother, a role that Harry hadn’t played in a while. He smiled. He had a persona in a file that would suit this perfectly, someone whom he’d never been.  
  
There was a hoot and a screech, and then the owl, suddenly hovering over Harry’s head, dropped the letter it held right in front of him. Harry reared back, swatting at it and trying to keep it from scattering the neat pile of good prospects he’d built up, but the owl immediately flew back to the table and started eating the treats as if nothing had happened.  
  
Harry scowled at it. He’d had many _letters_ that presumed nothing could be more important to the owner of Metamorphosis than helping them, but this was the first time the writers had started training their birds to be rude.  
  
He started to throw the letter on the bottom of the pile, for spite, but two things happened at once that prevented that. The owl hooted warningly, and Harry realized it must have been told to wait for a response. The last thing he wanted was for it to tear his office apart because it thought that he wasn’t showing sufficient respect.  
  
And he recognized Malfoy’s writing on the envelope.  
  
Harry hesitated for long seconds, telling himself he was stupid to let Malfoy affect him like this. Then he gave in to temptation and tore the letter open.  
  
 _Potter_ , it began, without the least word in front of his name to soften the blow. Harry clenched the edge of the table and took a long, hissing breath. This didn’t mean Malfoy knew he ran Metamorphosis, he told himself. It only meant that Malfoy had assumed a letter sent to this office would reach him.  
  
 _I need to see you again._  
  
Harry blinked and frowned. That was unexpected. Had some kind of trouble come up with Malfoy’s Machineries? He was already thinking about refusing the request, though. He wasn’t going to let Malfoy blackmail him forever, and that was what would happen if he came running every time the idiot was in trouble.  
  
 _I’ve finally learned something I should have realized long ago. There’s nothing I can do to_ make _my family give me what I need from them: their acknowledgment that I’m something more than the way to carry the Malfoy name into the future. I need more than that, but I’ll have to win it by some other route. And in the meantime, as so you so astutely guessed, freedom is more important to me than living by the rules._  
  
“What the fuck do _I_ have to do with this?” Harry mumbled, and read on.  
  
 _You’ve managed to achieve a level of freedom that I never thought you could, given how interested everyone in the wizarding world still is in you. You’ve done what you wanted, and you’ve got a job that makes you happy, and you probably still have your friends to cling as close to you and give you as much devotion as ever._  
  
Harry rolled his eyes. “Not helping me to make up my mind to help you, Malfoy.” The owl lifted its head from the edge of the table to glare at him, as if it had heard and resented that.  
  
 _I want you to show me how to do that._  
  
Harry blinked. “Become part of Metamorphosis? That won’t be happening. Besides, I doubt that you’re good enough with glamours to do something like that.”  
  
 _I want to see you one more time, at the Kellisons’ party. It’s a masked party. Come as you like; it ought to be easy for you to fit in without anyone recognizing either Harry Potter or Lionel Truth. But I want you to dance with me, and I want you to look at me with your eyes that have gazed so long on freedom and help me learn how to live a life like that.  
  
Draco Malfoy._  
  
Harry put the letter down and stared at it.  
  
It was the only request he had ever got that he didn’t know how to answer. That was part of the reason he ran Metamorphosis instead of trusting someone else to handle the paperwork and office work for him (besides the fact that there was no one he _could_ trust with a secret like this one). He had a set of skills that most of his clients got to see, even if they never knew it was Harry Potter behind them: skill in glamours, Transfigurations, changes of voice and growth of breasts that didn’t belong to him by nature. But he had a skill in knowing what the right persona for a given situation would be, too, and that was who he sent even if the clients initially thought they needed someone quite different.  
  
This time, though, Malfoy needed…what?  
  
Someone to give him lessons in freedom, he said. But Harry couldn’t teach Malfoy how to become someone who hid in plain sight when he didn’t want to share more of his secret than he already had. Besides, he didn’t think Malfoy needed those lessons, not when he had grown up around parents who had trained him to hide his emotions.  
  
Someone to give him the courage to stand up to his parents? But Harry didn’t know how in the world he was supposed to do that. If Malfoy’s business and Malfoy’s own cleverness and knowledge of his right to respect couldn’t do that for him, no one could.  
  
So Harry simply turned the letter over, wrote on the back, _I would be willing, but I don’t know what you want_ , and gave the letter to the owl. It flew out the window without looking at him again.   
  
Harry shook his head and turned back to his messages.  
  
Ten minutes later, he realized he was reading the same sentence over and over again, and tapping his fingers like a drumroll on the table, a gesture that belonged to Harry Potter, not the owner of Metamorphosis.


	4. Chapter 4

  
  
_I would be willing, but I don’t know what you want._  
  
Draco wanted to crumple up the letter when he read those words. Wasn’t it obvious? He had phrased it as openly as he knew how without making himself sound weak. All he needed to do to confirm that was turn his letter over, since Potter had been obliging enough to send his words back to him.  
  
And then he paused and made himself think more rationally about it, which was much more rationally than he wanted to think.  
  
Potter seemed to understand his goals perfectly well. That was proved by, if nothing else, the way he had reasoned out Draco’s desire for freedom with no one to tell him directly. But that wasn’t the same thing as seeing what he could do about it. He might rightly feel that the original bargain had been for help in promoting Malfoy’s Machineries, and that Draco could ask for no more than what he’d already received.  
  
Draco himself wasn’t sure what he wanted. An example? But he couldn’t follow the road that Potter had marked out for himself, and if the knowledge of Potter’s success was enough, well, he already had that.  
  
A champion? But he would feel weak if someone stood up for him and pushed him into the freedom he wanted, just as he would feel weak disgracing his family’s name to make Lucius see him as an individual.  
  
 _No_ , he decided, and his fingers curled into the edges of the paper, because it was more than he had wanted to find out about himself, at least like this.  
  
 _I want a companion._  
  
That was it. Walking into freedom by himself would be lonely, since he would have no one to follow him there (except perhaps his mother, who had surprised him with several sympathetic glances in the last day). He wanted someone who could walk beside him, who could laugh with him and challenge him when he became complacent and was in danger of losing what he had fought so hard to attain.  
  
Someone who could dance with him.  
  
Potter was the best candidate he had ever seen for that, and in fact the one who had sparked the desire in the first place, because Draco hadn’t been aware before that that this would be a wonderful thing to have.  
  
 _So, really, it’s all his fault_ , Draco thought. _He can’t blame me for wanting him beside me when he showed that he’d be capable of it._  
  
Potter perhaps didn’t need a companion. He made the whole world into that, unwittingly, since they didn’t realize who they were laughing at or admiring or fighting with. He was courage personified, daring and dancing and laughing.  
  
But Draco needed more.  
  
He sat there in an agony of mute indecision for a few minutes, wondering how he could express that need to Potter without exposing himself unforgivably. Then the barrier in his head broke, and he scribbled the necessary words down on the letter beneath Potter’s.  
  
 _I want you._  
  
He called for his owl, and ignored the reproachful look she gave him as he handed her yet another message. This was just the way it had to be, flights back and forth between him and Potter until he figured out how to assuage his need.  
  
 _Besides_ , he thought, as he sat there watching the owl soar away and tried to soothe his own sense of vulnerability, _Potter’s more likely to respond to raw and honest words than he is to sophisticated ones. So you could see this as my manipulating him so that he’ll agree to my desires.  
  
Those desires being centered on this need._  
  
Draco locked his hands together behind his head and shook it. It was impossible to escape the reality of how much he needed Potter for long. He would have to hope that he would eventually learn to live with it.  
  
*  
  
Harry sighed when the letter landed in front of him, and even more when he saw the words. Of course, this was a sigh produced from causes that Malfoy couldn’t have foreseen, because he didn’t know all the reasons that Harry had to hate and despise a statement like the one he’d just made.  
  
He wrote beneath Malfoy’s words, hoping that his hand would still be legible given his irritation, _Which of me do you want? Someone like Truth, except that he’ll help you in more substantial ways than just socially? Someone lovely and delicate as a flower, who the other pure-bloods will envy you for possessing? I can do that. But male or female? Old or young? Light in manner or haughty? With blonde or black hair? I need to know more than this simple thing. And I’ll expect to be paid this time._  
  
The owl gave him a long-suffering glance when he handed over the letter. Harry started to take it back, thinking he should let her rest, but she grabbed it, almost nipping his finger, and soared out the window before he could offer her the chance.  
  
“It’s not my fault that you’re not eating the treats and keeping up your strength!” Harry called after her.  
  
*  
  
Draco flattened his palm against his desk when he read Potter’s answer and ground his teeth. There was a suspicious prickling at the edges of his eyes, but he wasn’t going to weep, even if it was tears of frustration. What he wanted was perhaps not as simple as he had made it sound, and he needed to find the words, again, for a declaration that Potter couldn’t ignore.  
  
 _I want the person behind all the masks_ , he wrote. _With dark hair and green eyes, because that’s what you have. Come disguised if you need to; like I said, it’s a masked ball, and with as reclusive as you’ve pretended to be in the last few years, no one will expect to see you at the Kellisons’ party anyway. But I need the person who thinks up the glamours and Transfigurations, the person who’s good at this, the person who comes up with clever plans in the blink of a moment._  
  
He hesitated, then added, _I’m not going to pay you in coin. Think of the pay that a lover normally takes, and demand that._  
  
He used a second owl, because Duchess wouldn’t be ready to fly again for some time, and he needed to send this letter off before his nerve failed him and he tore it up, or at least erased the last words.  
  
But it was done now.  
  
*  
  
Harry leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes.   
  
It had come, then.  
  
His clients had fallen in love with him before, or the person they thought he was. They had offered him enormous sums to stay with them, or tried to discover where their “perfect strangers” came from when Harry left. But since those people didn’t actually exist, they never found a trace of them. The cover stories Harry prepared would run out under careful investigation, but that was part of the point. The truth was never what those cover stories dissipated to reveal, only blank nothingness. The most infatuated witch or wizard would give up in a few months and go back to loving someone they could actually know.  
  
But this was different.   
  
Harry had wondered what would happen if someone wanted the depths and not the surface, the mind and not the body, or at least only the body of the single, solitary person he’d been born, instead of the hundreds of people he’d evolved into. It had seemed unlikely to happen. Who knew his secret?  
  
But if someone did find out, it still wouldn’t matter. Everyone would react the way Hermione had when Harry had hinted to her that he was exploring the possibility of disguises and masks for passing unseen in wizarding society: that it was wrong and disgusting and the only “real” people were the ones who were alone in their heads. There was no way that Harry could confess his deepest deceptions. No one would understand.  
  
Now Malfoy seemed to know, and he had said that he still wanted the mind that could think like that, even the scarred and too-familiar body that contained the mind that had thought up the people he met.  
  
 _But he doesn’t know that I’m everybody behind Metamorphosis._  
  
Harry sat very still. For a long time, that fact, the secret he didn’t dare tell anyone else, had been the center of his life. When he was with his friends, he thought about it, and it was a beating heart, a second heart they didn’t know he had. _I’m a monster, really_ , he had wanted to say sometimes. _I have two hearts and a thousand minds, and you don’t know._  
  
When he was at the dances and parties with Malfoy, he hadn’t thought like that, but that was because he was being Lionel Truth, who had no reason to be an actor but his natural personality. And then, he had wanted to show Malfoy a level of skill that would explain his job but not set him thinking in other directions.  
  
For the very first time, confronted by an appeal he could hardly understand, his mind racing and dipping through colored clouds of interest and excitement, he wondered if the secret mattered all _that_ much.  
  
 _I’m many people. And I’m one. I don’t like thinking that way, because Harry Potter is so much a failure, but not the one that Malfoy knows. He sees a talented actor who can help him survive in a world that he’s known from birth and still finds uncomfortable to navigate.  
  
I’ve gone before him fully masked, and he knew me before I was masked at all.  
  
But what happens if I go before him_ half- _masked? He knows a little bit about what I do for Metamorphosis, but not the whole of it, not yet. And there’s no reason to tell him. I could tell him in the future. In the meantime, I can let him see the bravery and strength and cleverness he admires, and convince him that even more of that is behind the mask._  
  
Harry shut his eyes. His heart was sweet within him. That rush of freedom he’d experienced so often when he was dressing up as a new character for the first time crested and broke in his soul, and he might as well have been standing in a whole ocean of sweetness, of freedom, of artistry, of beauty, of all the things he’d become familiar with since he started running Metamorphosis.  
  
 _Malfoy’s like me. He likes freedom. He’ll appreciate this. He might be the only person who wouldn’t recoil when I do eventually reveal the whole secret to him.  
  
He’s giving me something new.  
  
I want to try this. And it’s without risk. If it doesn’t work out, I can retreat, and there’s no way he can find me._  
  
Harry smiled, and picked up the letter, and wrote,  
  
 _Malfoy. Yes._  
  
*  
  
Draco stirred anxiously, casting his glance around the great ballroom in which the Kellisons’ party was taking place. He expected Potter tonight, but Potter hadn’t said in which costume he was coming: as himself, or as Lionel Truth, or as someone else. Draco wondered if he would recognize another persona should Potter show up in it. He wanted to say he would, but he really didn’t know enough. (He himself was eminently recognizable, having come as the ancient Lord Longinus Malfoy, with his white robes and blond hair more than enough to play the part without a mask).  
  
And he didn’t know what kind of entrance Potter would make, either, or when it would be.  
  
The Kellisons’ party was, as always, magnificent. Other parties used illusion to invite the outdoors indoors. The Kellisons mingled them expertly, so that one passed from a shaded forest aisle into a circle of tables and chairs sheltered by walls, and then into a garden, and into a buffet with delicate foods protected from the elements by the elements of a house.  
  
The theme this year was green and silver. Draco didn’t think they’d chosen that in deference to Slytherin House, even though the current mistress of the house, Elizabeth Kellison, had been in Slytherin years ago. It was a convenient way to account for the leaves and the moon and starlight, however, without having to go to great lengths to make the vegetation look the right color and natural.  
  
Laughter whispered through the dusk that surrounded them (for the sections of nature were wrapped in real night, while the sections of the house were lit up exactly as they should be by candles and firelight). Draco had already seen a shimmering mist rising from the trees, and darting forms that vanished when he turned a head. He had watched an exquisite dance conducted by figures that could have been real fairies or costumed and masked guests. He had untied the mask from the face of a pale, fey, smiling woman, only to find that she had vanished as he untied the strings and he was left holding nothing but a black mask that began to chuckle softly.  
  
Draco shivered and tried to hold himself taller. This was Midsummer’s Eve, the last Starfire Night. It had always been the most complicated time, the most magical, the most enchanting. He had never felt fear during it before, though—or at most only the slight tickling frisson of delight before a horror that he knew couldn’t hurt him.  
  
Now, there was something that could.  
  
Had he been a fool to send that message to Potter? Perhaps so. The words Potter had written in return had warmed him like dragonfire, but that burn had long since gone. Perhaps he should have insisted on better arrangements, or said—  
  
A chorus of gasps arose from one end of the room. Draco had to step past seven trees and an overloaded table of pasties before he could see what was causing them.  
  
Then he gaped.  
  
He had known that Potter liked to make an entrance, but so far, the disguises he had adopted had at least been _human_. Draco had assumed without thinking about it that Potter preferred to adapt his glamours and Transfigurations to the human body, or, at most, the artifacts he handled and rode on, such as the horse he had made into a unicorn.  
  
This was something new, something more.  
  
Potter walked down the grand staircase that was the only unaltered part of Kellison Manor, his head held high and his steps the graceful, mincing ones of a peacock. Perhaps that made sense, given the huge silver wings that reared from his back and spread out behind him, arranged in a fashion that would recall a peacock’s tail.  
  
The wings looked utterly real. Draco immediately wanted to touch them, and he could see that desire echoed on faces all over the forest/dining hall. The feathers at the edge fluttered in the slight breezes that the Kellisons had sent spinning across their rooms to stir the leaves of the trees and add a hint of coolness to the evening, and the great primaries looked as if they might cut your finger. Potter paused at the bottom of the staircase, and the wings folded forwards, then straightened up again, with a tiny bob that made Draco’s mouth water. They appeared to spring from the middle of Potter’s back, between the shoulder blades, rather like butterfly wings might. But from their size and shape, they were a great bird’s.  
  
It occurred to Draco suddenly to wonder what had made Potter change his mind and enter the party as himself, wings or not, instead of another made-up person like Truth. He glanced at the man’s face for the first time.  
  
And then he wanted to laugh. Potter wore no disguise but a simple white mask fastened across his forehead and the bridge of his nose with careless grace, so that the startlingly green eyes showed through but the scar did not. He might also have used a charm to straighten his hair so that it wasn’t immediately recognizable as his own shaggy black mop.  
  
That was it. He had come as himself because he knew the wings would be enough of a distraction. People would think of _them_ far more than they would the man who wore them.  
  
 _And the best disguise is to hide in plain sight_ , Draco thought, as he moved forwards and held out his hand. Potter’s gaze fastened on him at once, but his eyes were so bright with satisfaction in his own glory that Draco couldn’t tell what he felt.  
  
“May I have this dance?” Draco asked softly.  
  
*  
  
Harry could feel his lips parting in surprise. It wasn’t so long ago that Malfoy had used a dance to show everyone around them—at least, many of the same guests would be here that had been at the Haggertons’ party—that he wasn’t gay, was in the proud tradition of the grand wizarding community, and that they would be safe buying new machines from him. Harry hadn’t expected more than a few quick conversations with Malfoy tonight. If he was right and he wanted Harry, that would still take them time to work out.  
  
But Malfoy stood there, hand held out despite the length of the silence since his request, his eyes steady.  
  
Harry understood then, or thought he did. _Freedom requires courage. Malfoy wants to show me that he’s free of the laws that do nothing to contribute to his pleasure and enjoyment of life._  
  
Admiration made him smile and accept Malfoy’s offered hand. “I would love to,” he said, and Malfoy tilted his head and shivered. Harry blinked. His voice had never had that effect on someone before, unless he’d added an auditory glamour or a Siren Spell to make it irresistible. Some of his clients wanted effects like that.  
  
 _Maybe it’s because it surprised him, to hear my voice without alteration_ , Harry thought, as they wended their way over a bridge which crossed a lily pond and through a series of small, round tables to the dance floor. _He couldn’t have known I would decide not to disguise it._  
  
The dance floor was a wide pane of something smooth and glassy, with patches of grass alternating with ordinary black tile. Harry smiled and cocked his head when he stepped onto it. Malfoy laughed, probably at the expression on his face, and rested a hand on his shoulder, caressing the fanned-out edge of one feather. Harry shivered in pleasure.   
  
“Does touching them mean touching _you_?” Malfoy asked, voice low and guttural as they began to move to the music. It was a slower and more traditional dance, for which Harry was grateful. He wouldn’t want to try a waltz or other fast dance with the wings clinging to his back and entangling his feet.  
  
“Yes,” Harry said. “I grew them from my back. They won’t let me fly, but they aren’t just illusion.”  
  
Malfoy promptly tweaked the feather again. Harry caught his breath, and the wings flexed in and out in response. He’d tied their movements to the movements of his lungs, because it was the best way he could think of to make them look realistic.  
  
Malfoy was a marvelous dancer, something Harry hadn’t truly noticed during the Arctica, when his attention was mostly fixed on his plan and what would happen next. Malfoy’s steps were light, quick, and smooth; he was always balanced no matter what awkward turns Harry had to make because of the wings, and he didn’t huff and gasp into Harry’s face the way some of his partners had, particularly when he turned himself into a tall woman. And his eyes never wavered.   
  
Harry knew some people might find that intense regard impolite, but he could smile at Malfoy, because of the mask and the wings. He was half-masked, the way he’d planned, and its effect on Malfoy was pleasant.  
  
“You’re taking an enormous risk,” Malfoy murmured, barely moving his lips, as if he wanted to fool someone looking at him from a distance rather than the stares of all the people who could see them very well from a few feet away. “Coming here like this. Someone might recognize your eyes.” He looked at his forehead, but Harry was wearing his mask across it. Nevertheless, he went on, as if he wanted to make the point. “Or your scar.”  
  
“I know that,” Harry said. He took a deep breath, and the wings spread to their fullest extent, scattering light. The breeze tugged at him. Harry knew he couldn’t really fly, but it _felt_ as if he could. He shuddered as Malfoy pinched another feather. “That’s part of the thrill.”  
  
Malfoy cocked his head and whirled Harry in a circle, which was a bit more difficult than usual with the wings, but which allowed Harry to come back to his arms with a graceful sliding motion. He appeared entirely unconscious of their audience, which had gone past staring into murmuring. “Funny,” Malfoy said. “I hadn’t thought of you as a risk-taking person when it came to your job. You wanted to be safe, didn’t you? To construct personas who would appear as different from you as possible.”  
  
Harry smiled and decided this wasn’t a good time to get into a discussion of how he pulled out bits of himself and gave them to his personas—his cleverness, his caution, his fear of the dark, his nightmares, his fondness for defensive magic. “I did,” he said. “And then I realized that being safe doesn’t really conduce to being free.”  
  
As he had thought would happen, Malfoy’s eyes went dusky, and he rested a firm hand on Harry’s hip as they moved in the next set of steps, which didn’t involve separating. “Is that what it’s really about for you?” he whispered. “It is for me, but I wasn’t sure what your motivation was.”  
  
“More than one motivation,” Harry said gently. “That motive is among them, though. Of course it is. How else could I hope to move around in the wizarding world unrecognized?”  
  
Malfoy gave him a withering stare. “Please tell me it’s more than that,” he said. “You want to be free of people bothering you, and nothing else?” His scorn clanged like iron.  
  
Harry laughed. He could feel the people around them stirring restlessly, wanting to know the source of his amusement, but still none of them would approach and ask. _The great cowards. They’re afraid of what might happen to them if they get too close_. “Yes, it’s more than that,” he said. “Dancing with fire. Wondering what I can create, and being _free_ to create, instead of assuming that I’m bound by the limits of my face or my body. Walking among people who would give a thousand Galleons to know who I was, and knowing they couldn’t guess.”  
  
Malfoy’s other hand tightened on his other hip, and Harry raised an eyebrow as he realized the picture they must make: dancing like pistons from the waist down, their feet hitting the dance floor hard, while their heads hovered close to each other. He let his eyelids fall over his eyes and gave Malfoy a look he knew was sultry. “Does that excite you?” he breathed.  
  
“Fuck, yes,” Malfoy said. His breathing was faster, and Harry felt a brush of smooth muscles against his own as Malfoy briefly leaned forwards. He bent back again, but nothing could hide the flush in his cheeks or the rasp of his breath now that Harry was looking for it. “You’re powerful,” Malfoy said. “You’ve managed to use your freedom to develop your power, and you’re not at anyone’s mercy. That’s what I want to be.”  
  
Harry considered him thoughtfully. “I can’t believe you couldn’t do that if you wanted to,” he remarked. “I know a lot of the younger pure-bloods are afraid of angering their parents and getting disowned, but you don’t seem to be, or you wouldn’t have started a Muggle-like business in the first place. What’s made you wait so long for your freedom?”  
  
Malfoy clapped his teeth together and didn’t respond for a moment. Harry could hear the clicking in his jaw, and imagined that he was grinding his teeth together as they turned and dipped in a circle, whirled faster than normal, and came back to almost their original place.   
  
“I wanted companionship on the journey,” Malfoy said at last. “Respect from my parents. Tolerance. Permission. If I could get it, then I thought I wouldn’t feel so lonely striking out on my own and doing something different to earn money. But I realized the other day that I’m probably not going to get it from them, and that there’s no good reason for me to deny my life because of their reluctance.”  
  
He bent slowly, as though he couldn’t bear for his eyes not to be perfectly on Harry’s level as he spoke the next words. “I still want someone to come with me. But I want someone else, someone outside my family.”  
  
Harry swallowed. He felt lost and small for a moment, and wondered if he should have come in a persona after all. Harry Potter, the way Harry knew him, was a man of too many failures to solve Malfoy’s problems.  
  
He concentrated on the sensation of the mask on his face, of the wings on his back. He was still half-masked, he reminded himself. He was still the daring, dazzling figure that Malfoy needed. Fuck, Malfoy was half making him _into_ that by talking about his needs. Harry could do what he had always done, adapt himself to be what the client wanted, the perfect stranger.  
  
 _Except I’m not strange to him._  
  
If he thought too much about that, he would panic and run out the door. He thought about other aspects of it, instead.  
  
“I don’t know if I can be your companion forever,” he said. “We’re very different. And I’m an artist, and you want a different kind of freedom.”  
  
Malfoy was silent in turn. They had circled around several times, and Harry thought some of the spectators were getting up their courage to approach, before Malfoy said, “A short time would be enough.”  
  
His hand tightened on Harry’s hip in a way that seemed to suggest he didn’t mean the words. Harry met his eyes and wondered what he should say in response. He didn’t want to disappoint Malfoy, but neither did he want to promise too much. And the situation was complicated by the fact that Malfoy knew who he was, so Harry would have less luck in vanishing.  
  
 _If that’s what I want to do._  
  
In reality, Harry didn’t think he wanted to, or at least he didn’t want to right now. The curious eyes prying at his disguise, and defeated by the simplest strategies…the way they danced together and defied anyone who cared to challenge them over it…the way Malfoy’s eyes burned into him as if they wanted to sear the mask off…  
  
Harry _liked_ this. He wasn’t being another persona, but the dance provided a similar level of excitement.  
  
“Well?” Malfoy whispered.  
  
Harry laughed and ran a caressing hand along Malfoy’s chest. “One thing you’re not is patient,” he said.  
  
“I’ve never needed to be.” Malfoy’s eyes shone for a moment like dew in the morning. “Except with my parents, and that turned out to be useless. They acted like their natural selves in the end, without reference to what I wanted or liked. But what about _you_? Are you going to put me off?”  
  
Harry paused, soaring through the moment as easily as though the wings were real, and then chose.  
  
“No.”  
  
He chose for the excitement, for the light that lifted him and blazed through him when Malfoy smiled, for the rustle of the wings about him—  
  
For the pleasure of the dance.  
  
*  
  
Draco didn’t realize how tightly he had been strung until he heard the words that emerged from Potter’s mouth. He closed his eyes and bowed his head, his body shaking with tremors that made him feel as though he had narrowly escaped a dragon’s mouth.  
  
 _When did I start thinking that I needed not just any companion, but Potter himself, to be happy?_  
  
Draco didn’t know, but he didn’t mind the thinking.   
  
He drew Potter closer, and Potter came, staring up at him out of those green eyes that looked all the darker and more striking because of their contrast with the mask. Time for Draco to do something that would stake his claim and mark his difference from the past and his union with the future more strongly than a mere declaration.  
  
He curled his arm around Potter’s neck and kissed him on the lips.  
  
A rushing noise rose around him, a chorus of mingled gasps and laughter and cries of disgust so thick that it resembled the ocean in Draco’s ears instead of a series of individual sounds. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the reaction of the man he was kissing, and so far that was stiff and unresponsive. Draco swirled his tongue gently along the lines of Potter’s lips, something that should get him a reaction if anything would, and waited.  
  
Potter finally moved.   
  
He lifted his hand in a lazy, dream-like motion and touched Draco’s neck, then his cheek, then the line of his nose, as though he were trying to make sure Draco hadn’t disappeared when he began the kiss. Then he gave a soft, contented sigh and opened his mouth in welcome.  
  
The thought flashed through Draco’s head on wings of lightning and was gone.  
  
 _My father will be angry when he hears about this._  
  
The lightning burned out. Draco moved closer still and tugged on the edge of one of the wings. As Potter gurgled in pleasure, Draco forced his tongue deeper, his body nearer, his knee between Potter’s legs.  
  
Potter pressed back, stronger than most of the lovers Draco had had, at least if the way he nearly toppled Draco over on the dance floor was to be believed. His wings flared wide and then wrapped close around them. Draco, his nose suddenly full of feathers, sneezed. Potter used the chance to wrestle away from him and stand there with one hand dramatically extended, his wings lifted high enough that everyone could see.  
  
“Choose,” Potter said, and he had altered his voice enough to be loud without masking the tone. Draco thought he saw a few frowns from the corners of his eyes as listeners fought to find the familiarity in the sound. “Do you have the strength to maintain this stance, or will you turn away and walk back to your normal life?”  
  
Draco almost smiled. In his own inimitable, overdramatic manner, Potter was asking a question that Draco had to answer.  
  
Draco bowed his head and said solemnly, “I choose this,” and then used the extended arm to spin Potter closer and engage in another kiss.  
  
The spectators were still staring. No one knew quite what to do, Draco sensed. On the one hand, propriety demanded that they turn their backs on two men kissing, or make nasty remarks about them, or hex them, or at least attempt to separate them. On the other hand, so many things about this situation were unreal that it seemed to become one with dreams, with mirages, with poetry.  
  
Or so Draco thought, because it was certainly a dream, the way that Potter began to kiss him then.  
  
A brilliant circle was forming around them. Draco thought he was seeing a halo of candle flame until he realized it was red and silver, and then he blinked and turned his head away from Potter’s kiss. He stroked his hair to try to let him know it was the only thing that could have made an effective distraction.  
  
The silver and red light leaked from their bodies, from the edges of Potter’s wings and the elaborate robes that Draco wore. Draco knew what it was. Their magic was reaching out to each other’s, creating a powerful tie that might lead to their experiencing each other’s sensations during sex, or responding more powerfully to pleasure, or—other things. Draco had never felt this before, so he didn’t know exactly what ought to happen.  
  
More sounds came from outside the circle of light, but they seemed less important than ever to Draco. He shook his head and leaned against Potter, his mouth once again finding his, his hands slipping from shoulders to waist to hips to wings. Potter kissed him back with something that might have been laughter trembling on his lips.  
  
Finally, someone cleared her throat beyond the circle of magic. Draco reluctantly turned to face her, and found it was Elizabeth Kellison, the hostess of the party. She had her hands clasped behind her back and a calmly inquiring look on her face as she looked back and forth between them.  
  
“I must ask you to remove yourself from my party,” she said. “Though we are masked, and thus we cannot be as angry about your insolence as it perhaps deserves, and though this is Midsummer’s Eve and freer than any other time of the year, the limit of license is good taste. You have surpassed those boundaries.”  
  
“Yes, perhaps we have,” Draco said, and caught Potter’s hand, half-afraid that he would retreat with someone close enough to recognize his eyes. Potter simply looked back and forth between Draco and Kellison, however, as if making sure that Draco was as calm as he seemed, before he bowed to Kellison and turned towards the entrance.  
  
The crowd made way for them, murmuring doubtfully, wonderingly, angrily, excitedly. Potter used his wings to sweep some of the more reluctant out of the way, and Draco didn’t bother to conceal the laughter in his eyes even though he kept it from his voice.   
  
Many of the faces that stared back at him looked almost hungry. Draco shook his head. He knew that many of the younger pure-bloods spent at least some time with lovers of the same sex, out of a desire for difference and excitement and pursuit of the forbidden if not from a desire for life-long companions. But they didn’t have the courage to seize their freedom the way he had seized his.  
  
 _Courage is what won me Potter._  
  
*  
  
Harry kept expecting the feeling of enchantment, of dancing on a high wire covered with light, to fade as they left the party. The masks, the illusions, the grass in the dance floor, they were all part of what had made this experience special to him. Leaving those behind must mean leaving behind the emotions they had inspired, and then perhaps he would regret that he had so impulsively agreed to what Malfoy asked of him.  
  
Any moment now. Surely.   
  
A few steps across the Kellisons’ immaculate grounds, and the feeling was still with him. Harry paused and tilted his head back to the cool night air, gulping at it. When he breathed in the summer, he thought, he would exhale his hope. He must.  
  
But it was still there, and the burning in his chest and in his mouth burned, as well, a hole in a certainty he had had for a long time.   
  
_What if I can achieve the feeling of freedom and creation I need in other ways than just by dressing up as other people? I’m only half-masked now, and I’m experiencing more than I do on most of my assignments.  
  
How much of what I do has become routine? The biggest rush is in the first creation of that persona, thinking about how I’ll dress up and about how I’ll adapt myself to that situation. Planning to be Miranda Goldreyer was more exciting than being her was._  
  
Lionel Truth had been an exception, but Malfoy hadn’t hired him through the usual channels and hadn’t treated him in the usual way. Harry had to wonder whether the life he had invented for himself was staling slightly, whether he needed something new.  
  
 _I’ve found something new._  
  
He turned, and Malfoy was there.  
  
They didn’t retreat into the shadows. Harry thought about the people who might be watching them from the windows of Kellison Manor, and then decided that he didn’t give a fuck if they were. It was their own fault for looking when their morals said they should have looked away.  
  
He and Malfoy collided, no longer held back by the formal steps of the dance or the desire to restrain their passion before an audience. Malfoy dragged his mouth away from Harry’s after the initial kiss and bit and licked down his neck. Harry got a handful of Malfoy’s hair between his fingers and worked them open and closed, letting the strands brush against his skin and awaken small, sharp thrills.  
  
“I don’t believe you,” Malfoy whispered, tugging at the collar of his robes until they burst open and let him have more access to Harry’s skin. “You’re too good to be real.”  
  
Harry arched his back and breathed deeply so that the wings flexed open and shut like his fingers. “I can become anything you want me to be,” he said. “I can do things that you’ve never dreamed of. I’m an artist.”  
  
“And better than that,” Malfoy said in a guttural voice, and got his mouth where he wanted, nipping sharply down Harry’s collarbone. Harry let his head roll back a moment and wondered how Malfoy could have known he was sensitive there.  
  
 _Legilimency?_  
  
But, for once, he didn’t seriously consider the possibility and didn’t tense in alarm at the prospect of someone finding out his secrets. He kissed Malfoy instead and then hauled himself closer, climbing Malfoy’s shoulders and waist like someone trying to ascend a mountain.  
  
Malfoy pulled back and frowned, starting to ask what he was doing, but Harry aligned their cocks and Malfoy’s mouth fell open as he shivered and _knew_.  
  
And the circle of red and silver magic flashed back into their bodies, lighting them up with sensation. Harry laughed, and held on.  
  
*  
  
Draco knew it was mad, to be engaging in sex like this in public, where anyone who liked might see them and then gossip the next day about how Draco Malfoy had achieved orgasm with a winged, male lover. Where anyone could see. Come to think of it, Draco wasn’t sure which part of that combination would provoke the most interest from the people who might read the papers, or the most outrage from his father.  
  
But madness was part of the tenor of the evening. It was mad for Potter to have wings on his back. It was mad for Draco to have decided that just being a respected businessman wasn’t enough, or that his father’s respect would never come and that he might as well do what he liked for a change. It was mad for it to be _Potter_ who had caught his attention in the first place, and it was most mad of all that he felt a kind of satisfaction whenever he thought of that, that it had been Potter.  
  
It didn’t matter.  
  
Draco curled his fingers into Potter’s shoulders and hung on. He tilted his head back and sighed blissfully between his teeth as their cocks rubbed against each other. He was hard, and Potter was hard, and the magic crackling back and forth between them let them feel each other’s hardness, the blood aching against the skin, the flush and the heat and the longing to come.  
  
Potter was panting. The sound was close to Draco’s ears and far from it, lost in a corridor of echoes that were fascinating to listen to. Brilliant sparks leaped, and he realized he had his eyes shut. He opened them, and found the sparks shining, too, in Potter’s eyes.  
  
Too much light. Too much heat. Too much madness, and it wouldn’t end, instead catching them up and forcing them relentlessly into a higher spiral. Draco had wings, and he didn’t know when he would return to the ground.  
  
Potter moaned. Draco felt the sound as it dragged itself up from his throat, and knew the way Potter clenched his teeth to contain it, and knew he couldn’t. The desperation behind the sound, the hunger, the anxiety, assaulted Draco, but he honestly had no idea whether he was feeling them as echoes of Potter’s emotions or simply as responses from his own mind and soul.  
  
His heart stuttered. He lowered his head and gritted his teeth, slamming his hips furiously against Potter’s, partially because he wanted to feel what would happen and partially because he wanted to end this and come.  
  
Cloth rasped against his cock—the material of Potter’s clothes or his own, who could say? Cool feathers brushed his face and the wings beat on his back, not powerful enough to carry him into the sky but feeling as if they should be so.  
  
Hair touched his face. His hot breath left his throats dry. His shoulders bore the clenching marks of fingers, and so did his hips. He rode the edge, and it was a fucking hard and twisty edge. He had no idea when it would let him go.  
  
Was he soaring? Then it was an eagle who had snatched him, and would set him back on the ground or let him fall at its pleasure.  
  
With an effort, Draco forced his eyes open. He didn’t remember when he had shut them, but he obviously had, because the sensations had simply become too much to cope with. But he knew the end was approaching at last, and nothing in the world, imaginary eagles or real wings, would prevent him from seeing Potter’s eyes when he came.  
  
The edge trailed before them for a few moments longer, and Draco saw flashes of blond and grey as he saw what Potter saw, but the green and the dark were stronger—  
  
Potter convulsed, mouth stuttering as though someone were forcing it open from the inside, his pleasure bouncing crazily through his body and then back and down into Draco’s stomach and his hips and his legs, rooting itself in the earth, shooting towards the heavens.  
  
Draco fell.  
  
The force of his orgasm was actually terrifying. He felt as though he experienced every separate drop of his semen as it slammed into the cloth stretched over his crotch separately—and wasn’t that a humiliating remembrance, that he hadn’t even taken his clothes off before they engaged in this—but perhaps naked would have been worse—  
  
The pleasure hurt his mind. Long after it faded, he half-slumped over Potter, his words slurred, his thoughts groping to try and find some way back home. He felt Potter’s hands on his back and his arms around his waist, and it really did seem as though those were the only things holding him up.  
  
But as he stood there, a dissatisfaction was born in his mind. He tried to ignore it. It felt vulgar to be dissatisfied after sex like _that_ , and especially when he began to wonder if that would happen every time he and Potter were together.  
  
He couldn’t ignore it.  
  
He leaned back. Potter looked calmly at him, his eyes wild and green, his wings spread about him in such a glory and glamour of feathers that they nearly distracted him from his purpose. But Draco had had enough time to grow used to the wings, or at least see them as an addition to Potter.  
  
And what he wanted was the real thing.  
  
“Take the mask off,” he whispered.  
  
*  
  
Harry froze. His thoughts had been whirling before, but now they slammed together and froze in his mind, sticking to one another like ice cubes.  
  
 _I’m half-masked. I came to his party, I danced with him, I had sex with him, I promised to be with him in the future, I did everything he wanted! He has no right to demand this of me!  
  
I promised to be with him in the future._  
  
Harry knew Malfoy enough to realize that he would demand something like this for any consort he took. No matter how disguised they might be in public, he was the kind to demand ruthless stripping in private.  
  
 _Or at least stripping to a level he’s comfortable with_ , Harry thought, eyeing Malfoy carefully. _He might allow people who are less powerful than him or who he knows better, like his parents, to hide behind masks. But not me._  
  
Malfoy never moved. He didn’t repeat his demand, either. He just stood there, looking steadily at Harry. His extended hand had slightly hooked fingertips, as if he wanted to reach out and snag the edge of the mask to drag it off, but wouldn’t do so unless Harry gave him permission.  
  
Harry burned for a moment. If Malfoy forced him to reveal himself, then it would be Malfoy’s fault and not his if it all went sour later, if Malfoy couldn’t take the newspapers talking about him dating Harry Potter or if his parents forced them apart—  
  
Then Harry bowed his head, ashamed of himself.  
  
 _Have I got that used to disclaiming responsibility?_  
  
He reached up with trembling fingers, and laid them along the edge of his mask. His hand hurt, as if he’d been cramping it or curling it up and hadn’t noticed. He swallowed, and thought the sound echoed further through the dark air than it should have.  
  
“Take it off,” Malfoy said, and this time there was a breathless moan behind the words that reminded Harry of the way he’d sounded when they were having sex.  
  
Mountains seemed to rise and fall in Harry’s mind in the time it took him to haul off the mask.  
  
His face emerged into the open air, solely as his, for the first time since he had set up the deception of being a recluse and “retreated” to Grimmauld Place. It was never Harry Potter who ventured out of the house. It was the Manager of Metamorphosis, or the other people Harry played.  
  
To be bare was terrifying.  
  
Harry would have been as happy to go on staring at the ground. But, no, he couldn’t do that. He raised his eyes to Malfoy’s face, using all the courage he had used when walking into the Forbidden Forest to die. If he had been wrong about Malfoy, this was a kind of death, too, and farewell all his artistry.  
  
*  
  
 _That bloody mask distorted things_ , Draco thought as he reached out and stroked down the side of Potter’s face. _I had no idea how beautiful he was._  
  
In the back of his mind, he had wondered if part of his attraction to Potter would fade once he looked at the world with bared features. What if Draco was only drawn by the mystery and the skill with which Potter flickered from part to part, playing many others but never himself? It _could_ have happened. One couldn’t simply discount things like that.   
  
But Potter with his face naked was just as wonderful and just as rare. Draco’s balls tightened, despite his recent orgasm, when he thought that he was the only one who had seen Potter like this in years.  
  
“Lovely,” he said, voice deep because they both needed it to be. “I want _you_.” He put careful emphasis on the last word and leaned down to kiss Potter again.  
  
His father would be furious. The wizarding world would be outraged. At least some of Draco’s custom would suffer as conservative wizards and witches stopped buying his products in shock.   
  
But Draco had someone beside him who possessed the cleverness and courage to conquer those things.   
  
And, inspired by Harry, Draco was hardly going to matter _less_.  
  
*  
  
Harry felt as though he were about to fall over. That someone could want Harry himself—Harry Potter, the failed Auror, who had made so many mistakes in the year after the war, who had done stupid and insignificant things that didn’t matter nearly as much as he had wanted them to, whose intelligence and good sense and bravery were always on loan to other people—  
  
It changed the world.  
  
Harry raised his hands and shaped them around Draco’s face, around the bones and the eyebrows, the nostrils and lips. Draco stared at him with softly amused eyes, raising his brows as if to ask whether he satisfied Harry.  
  
 _You do so much more than that_ , Harry thought to him. _You inspire me to be honest._  
  
Trembling, as delicately uncertain as a creature newly emerged from the chrysalis in the act of unfolding its wings, Harry leaned in and returned the kiss.  
  
Draco smiled at him.  
  
 _Maybe someday I can tell him about owning and managing Metamorphosis, being all those people. If he can survive what the world’s going to hurl at us, I don’t think he’ll run._  
  
Harry closed his eyes. The promise of “someday” having someone to trust with his secrets was more than he had ever possessed.  
  
“ _I_ want you,” he whispered back, and his words seemed as clear and pure as the starfire these nights were named for.  
  
 _I am freer than I was._  
  
 **The End.**


End file.
